Getting Satellite Remote Sensing from Demonstration Project to Operational use – The ongoing New Zealand Experience
Introduction
The Division of Information Technology is one of 24 division in the Government’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. As well as running the national scientific compute network, one of the division’s primary objectives is to be the New Zealand centre of ezoellence for digital image processing and remote sensing, and to market this technology to other New Zealand organizations.
Past Uses of Remotely Sensed Data in New Zealand
Systematic aerial photographic coverage of the whole of New Zealand commenced in 1936 and has been updated at reasonably regular interval since then,. Most organizations needing mapping and surveying information are operational users of black and white aerial photographs. As well, there are available good quality topographical, geological, and some other “ theme” maps of the country to at least 1:250 000 scales . These factors, in combination, meant that when the first satellite remote sensing data of New Zealand ( Landsats 1 and 2) became available in 1973, most of the details discernable at that spatial resolution were already known or, at least, conjectured. Uses of the multispectral nature of the data (crop surveys, vegetation mapping, etc) were trilled also. The general consensus from these experiments was that these data were useful but that results would be more accurate once better spatial resolutions was available.
In 1986/7, New Zealand participated in the French SPOT PEPS experiments ( Ellis et al., 1987 Belliss et al., 1987). With spatial resolutions of 10 and 20 metres, these data were at last appropriate to the scale of mapping and monitoring operations required by most potential users. Currently, SPOT is our only source of high resolution satellite data and imagery of approximately 20% of the country is archived at DIT, the New Zealand distributor.
As well, New Zealand also took part in the Shuttle Imaging Radar-B experiments in 1984/85 (Belliss & Oliver, 1988, McDonnell, 1986). Although the data obtained was rated at 1% quality, some useful results were achieved and it is felt that these data have great potential for mapping both in New Zealand and in the Ross Dependency, Antarctica.
Now that the scale of satellite remote sensing data is appropriate for New Zealand uses other problems, such as data availability, delivery times, and cost dominate people’s perception of the uses of these data.
