High-quality satellite images of most of North America are being offered to UCSB faculty, researchers, and students at low or no cost, provided an acceptable proposal is submitted to the recently created SPOT at UCSB Program Advisory Board.

A new agreement between UC Santa Barbara and a private company, Terra Image USA, headquartered in Santa Barbara, supports this service with archived images from the United States and Canada (but not Mexico), according to David Siegel, director of the Institute for Computational Earth System Science (ICESS), the lead university institute in the partnership.

“Like most other universities, UCSB has had to rely upon mostly low resolution data sets, such as NASA provides, which have a resolution of one kilometer per pixel,” said Siegel. “What we’re getting from Terra Image USA has a resolution 400 times higher, which is comparable to aerial photography, and allows one to view and study buildings, trees, cars, and the impacts people make on the Earth.”

The licensing agreement stipulates that the free data comes from a ground station in Lethbridge, Canada. SPOT data from elsewhere will have a nominal fee—if the data is available. However about 90 percent of the North American scenes after May 2004 are in the Terra Image, USA, archive.  For information on the UCSB SPOT program and pricing, contact Darla Sharp at darla@icess.ucsb.edu or x8475. The program also has a Web site <www.spot.ucsb.edu>.

“We’re very excited that more than 40 UCSB faculty members, and many more of their students, doing research that utilizes satellite imagery, will have virtually unlimited access to high spatial resolution commercial satellite imagery,” said Siegel, who is a professor of geography. Besides current satellite images, researchers will be able to access archival images as far back as 1986.

Terra Image USA, the master distributor for the U.S. market of satellite images from the French-owned SPOT Earth imaging satellites, will also benefit from the partnership through the promotion of SPOT data for research and the training of future users of this data.

“Historically, SPOT imagery has had a high cost and restrictive licensing,” said Mike Hopkins, CEO of Terra Image USA. “We have dramatically reduced the cost and loosened the licensing. But making SPOT imagery more accessible is an ongoing effort. To directly address the university market, we wanted to start by partnering with a university. UCSB is one of the country’s leading Earth remote sensing science programs. It also happens to be in our backyard.”