QuickBird ImageryDescriptionThe Global Land Cover Facility redistributes QuickBird imagery courtesy of the DigitalGlobe Company of Colorado and NASA. DigitalGlobe generously donated imagery for free distribtution 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 DigitalGlobe 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 DigitalGlobe/NASA license requirements. 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, 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 GoogleEarth, 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 (Figure 1a,2) and a panchromatic acquisition at .61cm spatial resolution (Figure 1b). 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
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