In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

 The ESA published today an article named CryoSat ice data now open to all.

From the article: ""As of today, the international science community will have free and easy access to all of the measurements from CryoSat. This will amount to a unique dataset to determine the impact climate change is having on Earth's ice fields."  [...] Launched in April last year, CryoSat and the ground processing set-up have shown to be in excellent working order. [...] CryoSat carries a sophisticated radar altimeter that can measure the thickness of sea ice down to centimetres and detect changes in ice sheets, particularly around the edges where icebergs are calved from the vast ice sheets that cover Greenland and Antarctica."

The Canadian Space Agency announced that RADARSAT-1 mosaics are now accessible to the general public.

From the announcement: "For the last 15 years, RADARSAT-1 has observed the Earth from space. Over time, the satellite has generated an impressive collection of images, some of which were used to produce high-resolution mosaics of areas of interest. These were acquired in relatively short time spans and provide a snapshot in time that can be used for studying terrestrial geology, geomorphology, vegetation, coastal features, wetlands, urbanization and ice dynamics. In order to facilitate access to this Earth Observation data, mosaics of Canada, the United States, Africa, Australia and Antarctica are now available to the general public and can downloaded (without restriction) on the CSA web site."

The ESA just announced the release of the global land cover dataset GlobCover 2009.

From the official source: "The GlobCover project has developed a service capable of delivering global composites and land cover maps using as input observations from the 300m MERIS sensor on board the ENVISAT satellite mission. Currently, ESA makes available a set of products covering 2 periods: December 2004 - June 2006 and January - December 2009. [...] The GlobCover composites are derived from the pre-processing module of GlobCover, which includes a set of corrections as cloud detection, atmospheric correction, geolocalisation and re-mapping. The GlobCover Land Cover map is compatible with the UN Land Cover Classification System (LCCS)."

We mentioned the GlobCover dataset quite a few times in the past.

Yesterday, we announced the update and expansion of the parcel coverage available in our ParcelStream™ web service. Our ParcelStream™ customers now have access to over 110 million parcels and we plan to have 120 million parcels by the end of 2010. While many people already understand the value of parcel data, we thought this would be a good time to share some thoughts on parcel boundary data and just why we find it to be such a valuable data set.

To begin, let’s discuss what exactly parcel boundaries are, this will help us understand their importance. Parcel boundaries are the precise GIS coordinates of a piece of property. Overlaid on top of a satellite or aerial image, they show a mapped image of the exact boundaries of a lot. They allow a potential real estate buyer to "walk" the boundaries of a piece of property from an online map, seeing its proximity to streets and highways, distance from neighboring homes, and access to green space, streams and wooded areas.

Parcel boundaries do more than just provide a "bird's eye view" of a piece of property. Once the GIS coordinates of a property are loaded into a map-based platform, they can be combined with additional data sets like school districts, neighborhood demographics and other location information. Governments use parcel data to assess service areas, make predictions and respond to disasters.