Use of Commercial Satellite Imagery in National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service (NESDIS) Products and Operations

The recent boom in the commercial satellite industry has provided many opportunities to utilize private sector imagery for product operations. While NOAA owns and operates its own fleet of environmental satellites, these missions’ goal is to provide complete coverage of the United States via geostationary or polar orbit, thus the revisit times and resolutions are inadequate for some applications. NOAA operations and research are in a crossroads where the future is using a hybrid commercial-government imagery approach. Due to the undeniable advantages of tapping into these commercial systems, large government data buys exist to bring commercial imagery to various government agencies (NRO, NGA, NOAA, DOI, BSEE, USCG, USGS). In order for operations to stay cutting edge and relevant, NOAA and other government agencies must incorporate commercial and international imagery in its research and operations going forward.

Commercial imagery offers a number of advantages such as more frequent revisit times, higher resolution, targeted imaging, unique wavelengths, synthetic aperture radar and even full motion video. In addition, these missions are usually much smaller satellites with just imagers aboard, thus the build time is much quicker than the large multi-sensor missions currently run by NOAA. This leads to an entire fleet of smallsats offering synthetic aperture radar (SAR), multispectral or hyperspectral imagery over a target multiple times per day. It is also worth noting that these smallsat missions frequently work on imaging targets submitted by customers as opposed to constant imaging. This unique ability to task the imager to turn towards a target as it passes overhead facilitates multiple revisits per day, and multiple chances to image a target in a given day, thus providing retries should clouds or other obstacles arise, and gives the user multiple look angles from which to choose.

Providing multiple revisits in conjunction with low earth orbit and higher resolution, this imagery is invaluable during disaster response or research campaigns where the target is small, rapidly evolving or is dependent on imaging geometries. In some NESDIS operational products and research, such as detection of methane plumes, ocean plastics, beached or stranded whales, marine oil spills, and illegal fishing vessels, this imagery is integral. The layering effect of using various satellite sources, both commercial and government, creates a better quality product and keeps NESDIS products competitive with newly developed commercial products and automated products.