RESA RELOADED – high-resolution optical satellite data for German research projects
The RapidEye Science Archive (RESA) has become operational at DLR’s Earth Observation Center (EOC) as part of the German Satellite Data Archive (D-SDA). About 60,000 high-resolution satellite scenes from the RapidEye, PlanetScope and Skysat missions ordered by RESA project users since 2009 have already been loaded into the new data collection. Future plans include the possibility for new additions through “calls for science”.
The RESA archive can be accessed free of charge via D-SDA’s EOWEB GeoPortal (EGP). With the “permission management” function, interested users from German research, educational, and public institutions as well as private companies can create or extend a self-registered EGP user account. To do so, the research topic must be briefly described and the name of the organization entered in the portal. The one-off account activation for the whole archive will then follow within a few days.
D-SDA safeguards long-term the data from numerous German and international earth observation missions and makes them accessible to the research community. The high-resolution optical satellite images from the RESA archive are an asset when monitoring small scale phenomena and developing deep- and machine-learning algorithms for image analysis. Monitoring tsunamigenic volcanoes, or training deep learning based algorithms to automatically process mass Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data to support civil protection in the course of floods, are only some recent examples of the use of RESA data in DLR projects. The RESA programme is managed by the German Space Agency at DLR with funds from the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) and realized together with the US project partner Planet Labs Inc.
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