The first of its kind data archive, launched by the UK
Space Agency’s Space for Smarter Government Programme
(SSGP), has updated its free optical and radar data sets of
Britain and Northern Ireland.
The Agency is working to help government departments
understand how they can use Earth observation (EO) data and
create opportunities for new collaborations with industry
and academia, as well as overcoming the cost barriers to
test the capabilities of high resolution imagery.
The data, originally made available in March 2019, is
intended to benefit the public sector in areas such as
planning and development and environmental monitoring,
while boosting further growth in the UK’s world-leading
space industry, which already employs nearly 42,000 people.
Ryan King, UK Space Agency’s SSGP Manager said:
Since we first made this kind of data available to the
public sector just over a year ago, we have seen 188
expressions of interest across 98 public sector bodies,
and nearly 40 collaborations between government, industry
and academia. We have already seen this data used for
flood mapping, infrastructure monitoring, machine
learning and habitat classification to name a few.
Now we have added more available data to provide higher
temporal resolution across key urban areas and
infrastructure locations such as London, Liverpool and
the North East of England, as well as several stacks of
synthetic aperture radar imagery, to enable much more
detailed change detection. From this we hope to see the
public sector and wider supply chain working together to
explore how high resolution satellite imagery can address
key current challenges like remote asset management and
environmental impacts such as the use of natural
resources and changes in land use.
The archive data will be available for up to two years to
explore what role high resolution satellite data could have
in public sector delivery, and SSGP is developing hands-on
training for civil servants on how to process and use the
data.
The data has been made freely available to government
through the Sentinel Data Access Service (SEDAS portal)
hosted by the Satellite Applications Catapult for the
purpose of research and development (R&D). Industry and
academia can also access the data providing they have a
demonstrable public sector sponsor and use case.
