Spot potential applications to agriculture and coastal land use

Abstract

SPOT will be launched by the end of 1985. SPOT will provide Earth's images with 10 meters resolution in black and white or 20 meters in the multispectral mode at vertical or off-nadir viewing and ressingle frame or stereopair. Scenes will cover an area 60 km. long (along the ground track) and 60 to 80 km. wide (in the cross track direction) depending on the instrument viewing angle. The SPOT program has been planned and designed as an operational and commercial system. The organizational structure adopted for the management of the program clearly distinguishes between the functions of technical system management, executed by CNES and the responsibility assigned to SPOT IMAGE, a commercial corporation, for relations with the users community and the data distribution. The many innovative SPOT features combined with well adapted products should provide the users with high value information in a variety of application fields such as cartography, agriculture, town planning, environment, coastal studies and geology. In 1979, it was decided as part of the preparation for and the promotion of the SPOT programme, to conduct a series of campaigns aimed at simulating the types of imagery that will be recorded by the SPOT earth observation satellites. At first this exercise was simply intended to meet the requirements of users who had participated in the drawing up of the specifications. In view of the interest created by the first simulated images, this program, managed by GDTA (Groupement pour le Developpement de la Teledetection Aerospatiale), which was open to French laboratories during the first year, was quickly extended to cover a number of foreign countries and made open to all users. The analysis completed have yielded promising results suggesting that SPOT data should be well suited to a wide range of applications from which some samples have been selected in this paper.