Artic and Antartica archives now available in shapefile format

Following requests from some users, we have made available two new archive coverages in shapefile format on our online catalog : Antartica and the Arctic region. As a contribution to the International Polar Year (http://www.ipy.org/), Spot Image has been collecting a lot of data over these two areas, so I hope that these two shapefiles will be of great interest for many scientists.

Access to the download page : http://sirius.spotimage.fr/PageDownload.aspx
More information on about Spot Image and the IPY : http://www.spotimage.fr/web/en/1587-international-polar-year.php

Buy a photograph from the Earth taken by satellite

SPOTGallery Gadget

Now that a new version of SPOTGallery is available, I would like to remind you of a Google Gadget that is available. It displays the wonderful images of the gallery right on your iGoogle home page or on your personal website.

The gadget can be find on Google's Gadget Library : http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open&q=SPOTGallery and http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open&num=24&url=http://gallery.spotimage.com/gadgets/earth.xml&output=html

New features in Spot Image Gallery

The updated version of the SPOT Gallery proposing posters of wonderful pictures of Earth taken by SPOT satellites propose two new features :

A interactive photo album : http://gallery.spotimage.com/gallery.html

and an interactive map : http://gallery.spotimage.com/kml/gmap.htm

The later is obtained by requesting GoogleMaps to display a KML file that presents all the pictures as a GoogleEarth layer. The KML file is available here : http://gallery.spotimage.com/kml/gallery.kml It is very similar to the GoogleEarth version that you can still find here : http://gallery.spotimage.com/kml/googleearth_english.kml Nevertheless, there are some small real-estate differences between GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth that forced us to slightly rewrite the KML content. In particular, it is not possible to have big bubbles in GoogleMaps so we had to use smaller bubbles.

Download SPOT archives in shapefile

Since several weeks the SPOT archive is available for download in shapefile from our online catalog : SIRIUS Online. Several files have been created to cover the various continents : Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, Middle East, North America and South America. They can be find in the "My searches" menu or directly here : http://sirius.spotimage.fr/PageDownload.aspx

Here are the parameters that are exported in the shapefile :

A21 : A21 code
SC_NUM : Scene number
SEG_NUM : Segment number
SATEL : Satellite number (2, 4, 5)
ANG_INC : Incidence angle
ANG_ACQ : Acquisition angle
DATE_ACQ : Acquisition date (DD/MM/YYYY)
MONTH_ACQ : Month number (01,02,…)
TIME_ACQ : Time of acquisition (HH:MI:SS)
CLOUD_QUOT : Cloud quotation
CLOUD_PER : Percentage of clouds on the image
SNOW_QUOT : Snow quotation
LAT_CEN : Latitude of center
LON_CEN : Latitude of center
LAT_UP_L : Latitude of upper left corner
LON_UP_L : Longitude of upper left corner
LAT_UP_R : Latitude of upper right corner
LON_UP_R : Longitude of upper right corner
LAT_LO_L : Latitude of lower left corner
LON_LO_L : Longitude of lower left corner
LAT_LO_R : Latitude of lower right corner
LON_LO_R : Longitude of lower right corner
RESOL : Resolution of product (2.5, 5, 10, 20)
MODE : BW or COLOR
TYPE : Alphanumeric code for the type (P,X,M,I,A,B,J,THR,HMX,THX)
URL_QL : URL to access to the quicklook of the scene

The files are bundled by year since 2002 which is the launch of SPOT5. They are refreshed every month and the shape file for the current year is refreshed every week.

They can be used on any GIS software like ArcView, GlobalMapper (shareware), ArcExplorer (free) or MapWindow (free).

Display a SPOT satellite image in your web pages

Using GoogleMaps Static API, you can easily display a satellite image from SPOT in your web pages. Actually, when using zoom factor 14 over France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium and several other countries, you always get a SPOT satellite image. For exemple, here is a SPOT5 view of the city of Auch in France :



Here is the corresponding HTML code :

<img width="320" height="320" src="http://maps.google.com/staticmap?center=43.643902,0.590429&zoom=14&size=320x320&maptype=satellite&key=API_KEY" />

You can easily get an API_KEY from Google by registering on http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html

SPOTMaps now directly available online

Spot Image has launched a new online service that lets you view, order, receive your SPOTMaps on line in minutes: SPOTMaps Online

To discover SPOTMaps Online, go to http://spotmaps.spotimage.com

What are SPOTMaps?
- Uniform 2.5-metre colour mosaics
- High location accuracy of an orthorectified product
- Already available for 30 countries with many more coming
- Framed per sq.km to match your area of interest (country, region or zone)
- List price: €2 per sq.km

SPOTMaps are easy to use, providing current and accurate imagery of your area of interest that integrates directly into your GIS and complements any kind of georeferenced database.
SPOTMaps is the ideal geographic reference for your visualization, mapping, planning and communication needs.

More information about SPOTMaps products: http://www.spotimage.com/en/spotmaps