QuickBird Description

Description

The Global Land Cover Facility redistributes QuickBird imagery courtesy of the Digital Globe Company of Colorado and NASA. Digital Globe generously donated imagery for free distribution covering protected areas impacted by the December 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. This imagery is available for free to help assess damage and determine mitigation. The GLCF also redistributes QuickBird imagery from Digital Globe that was acquired as part of the NASA Science Data Purchase in 2001-2003. The SDP collection is only available through restricted access, though imagery is free to those scientists who meet the Digital Globe/NASA license requirements. QuickBird data is invaluable because of its ultra fine resolution, which makes it suitable for local land cover assessment as well as for validation of more coarse resolution collections (Figure-1). Additionally, QuickBird 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. QuickBird's ultra fine resolution imagery is familiar to users of Google Earth, and anyone watching many news broadcasts involving that technology. QuickBird imagery available through the GLCF is provided in its native format. An individual scene is composed of a multispectral acquisition at 2.8m spatial resolution and a panchromatic acquisition at .61cm spatial resolution Table 1 details the specific wavelengths covered by each band. The acquisitions have an RMSE of roughly 14m. The images are provided in GeoTIFF and should be compatible with most GIS, remote sensing and imaging software. The datum is WGS84.

Table 1: Spectral Resolution

	Panchromatic	Multispectral
Spectral Characteristic	Black & White	Blue	Green	Red	Near IR
Spectral Characteristic	450 - 900 nm	450 - 520 nm	530 - 600 nm	630 - 690 nm	760 - 900 nm

Figure 1. Urban Sprawl- (Left Image is before and Right Image is after)

DigitalGlobe Data Rights (6.85 KB)
NASA Data Rights Interpretation Letter (10.4 KB)