in every 2–3 days. The data are stored in two places: Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF)
and National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).
TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) has stopped collecting data on
April 15, 2015. It delivered an extraordinary global dataset of 17 years on tropical
rainfall and lightning. The dataset is the space standard for measuring precipitation.
It could support applications like drought monitoring and weather forecasting. Since
its end of the mission, the historical dataset can help us to analyze the relationship
between precipitation and crop growth. The follow-on mission, the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM), provides the measurements similar to TRMM with
improvded quality and spatio-temporal resolutions.
GOES satellites are very famous in weather and meteorology domain. The vast
majority of weather reports and forecasts we see on TV/the Internet/newspapers or
listen in the radio (in the United States) are derived from the observations of these
satellites. The satellites circle in the geosynchronous orbit which allows them to stay
in a fixed position in the space and observe the same region of Earth 24/7. The
elevation is approximately 22,300 miles. They can not only stare at the atmosphere
but also sense the Earth’s surface temperature and water vapor dynamics. NOAA
and weather companies operate their own weather models upon GOES datasets to
generate reports and forecasts. Agricultural industries in the Americas (both North
and South) have utilized those reports and forecasts for a long time.
The Sentinel is a series of EO satellites launched by the European Space Agency
(Butler 2014). The program starts in 2014, and the data are available on a website
named Copernicus Services Data Hub for downloading. Researchers in agriculture
have begun to use its datasets (Arias and Inglada 2015; Drusch et al. 2012; Torbick
et al. 2017).
Given these excellent and long-lasting satellites above, which have saturated the
medium-low spatial/spectral resolution market of EO, the latest developments start
to dig into the high-resolution market. Big achievements have been made in either
government programs or private projects. One giant, DigitalGlobe (Wikipedia
2014a), stands in this area with many small-to-medium corporations surrounded.
Most of them are backed by their own governments. For example, the operator of
SPOT satellites, SPOT Image, is a company created by the French Space Agency.
DigitalGlobe has the best optical imagery database with the highest spatial resolution
(0.31 m) and best coverage. It owns and operates QuickBird, IKONOS, WorldView,
and GeoEye. The data from these satellites almost take up the entire buying market
of ultra-high-resolution Earth images. Google Maps, Apple Map, Bing Maps, and
many other free mapping services adopt the tiles generated from their images. The
major opponent of DigitalGlobe is the SPOT program in France. The SPOT satellites
have stably obtained 1-meter-resolution images from the 1980s and are accounted as
the producers of the highest resolution images in the world in the last century.
However, after the resolution of DigitalGlobe surpassed SPOT by a lot, the market
has obviously leaned more to the former. Meanwhile, a brand new player, the
CubeSat, shines in the market (Heidt et al. 2000). The CubeSat is a specification
to facilitate frequent and affordable access to space with launch opportunities
available on most launch vehicles (Lee et al. 2009; Toorian et al. 2008). The size
4 Agro-geoinformatics Data Sources and Sourcing
49
and National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).
TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) has stopped collecting data on
April 15, 2015. It delivered an extraordinary global dataset of 17 years on tropical
rainfall and lightning. The dataset is the space standard for measuring precipitation.
It could support applications like drought monitoring and weather forecasting. Since
its end of the mission, the historical dataset can help us to analyze the relationship
between precipitation and crop growth. The follow-on mission, the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM), provides the measurements similar to TRMM with
improvded quality and spatio-temporal resolutions.
GOES satellites are very famous in weather and meteorology domain. The vast
majority of weather reports and forecasts we see on TV/the Internet/newspapers or
listen in the radio (in the United States) are derived from the observations of these
satellites. The satellites circle in the geosynchronous orbit which allows them to stay
in a fixed position in the space and observe the same region of Earth 24/7. The
elevation is approximately 22,300 miles. They can not only stare at the atmosphere
but also sense the Earth’s surface temperature and water vapor dynamics. NOAA
and weather companies operate their own weather models upon GOES datasets to
generate reports and forecasts. Agricultural industries in the Americas (both North
and South) have utilized those reports and forecasts for a long time.
The Sentinel is a series of EO satellites launched by the European Space Agency
(Butler 2014). The program starts in 2014, and the data are available on a website
named Copernicus Services Data Hub for downloading. Researchers in agriculture
have begun to use its datasets (Arias and Inglada 2015; Drusch et al. 2012; Torbick
et al. 2017).
Given these excellent and long-lasting satellites above, which have saturated the
medium-low spatial/spectral resolution market of EO, the latest developments start
to dig into the high-resolution market. Big achievements have been made in either
government programs or private projects. One giant, DigitalGlobe (Wikipedia
2014a), stands in this area with many small-to-medium corporations surrounded.
Most of them are backed by their own governments. For example, the operator of
SPOT satellites, SPOT Image, is a company created by the French Space Agency.
DigitalGlobe has the best optical imagery database with the highest spatial resolution
(0.31 m) and best coverage. It owns and operates QuickBird, IKONOS, WorldView,
and GeoEye. The data from these satellites almost take up the entire buying market
of ultra-high-resolution Earth images. Google Maps, Apple Map, Bing Maps, and
many other free mapping services adopt the tiles generated from their images. The
major opponent of DigitalGlobe is the SPOT program in France. The SPOT satellites
have stably obtained 1-meter-resolution images from the 1980s and are accounted as
the producers of the highest resolution images in the world in the last century.
However, after the resolution of DigitalGlobe surpassed SPOT by a lot, the market
has obviously leaned more to the former. Meanwhile, a brand new player, the
CubeSat, shines in the market (Heidt et al. 2000). The CubeSat is a specification
to facilitate frequent and affordable access to space with launch opportunities
available on most launch vehicles (Lee et al. 2009; Toorian et al. 2008). The size
4 Agro-geoinformatics Data Sources and Sourcing
49