IKONOS Imagery

Description

The Global Land Cover Facility redistributes IKONOS imagery courtesy of the GeoEye Company of Virginia and NASA. The GLCF redistributes IKONOS imagery that was acquired as part of the NASA Science Data Purchase in 2000-2003. The SDP collection is only available through restricted access, though imagery is free to those scientists who meet the Space Imaging/NASA license requirements. IKONOS-2 is the first successful US Commercial Remote Sensing satellite, and was originally owned by the Space Imaging Company of Colorado. GeoEye now owns IKONOS-2 and imagery from that satellite, as well as the OrbView-3 satellite.

This data set is invaluable because it is ultra fine resolution, which makes it suitable for local land cover assessment as well as for validation of more coarse resolution collections. Additionally, IKONOS is valuable because the four multispectral bands approximate the first four bands of Landsat imagery. While they are not immediately interoperable, they can be and still retain scientific integrity.

IKONOS imagery available through the GLCF is provided in its native format - meaning the GLCF has not processed beyond the level originally provided. The metadata files accompanying this data set explain acquisition, processing and output characteristics. An individual scene is composed of a multispectral acquisition at 4 meter spatial resolution and a panchromatic acquisition at 1 meter spatial resolution. The images are provided in GeoTIFF and should be compatible with most GIS, remote sensing and imaging software. The datum is WGS84.