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A continuous development of sensor technologies is guaranteed for the next decades by many national and international remote sensing projects. By the increasing number of sensors becoming thereby available also the temporal resolution will considerably be increased. These aspects ensure the procurement of potential satellite data to be used by National Mapping Agencies (NMAs) and private mapping companies, and result in an enhanced application potential of satellite image data for cartographic mapping.
As suited processing methods for high-resolution digital satellite image data have been steadily developed in the past, even the now available remote sensing image data can be applied to map production at meaningful scales. Thus, the capabilities of the existing sensor systems for their use in different applications will be significantly extended as spaceborne high-resolution image data will be available more frequently in the near future.
At the moment, satellite image data are only used to a small extent for the tasks of the NMAs. The reasons for this lie in a historically grown structure within the mapping agencies on one hand and the fact that present satellite image data partly meet the high geometric and thematic accuracy requirements for mapping products, on the other hand.
Radar data have not any importance to the work carried out at the NMAs. Therefore, only optical satellite data and aerial photography has been used within the workshop. In the following listings only optical satellite data will be treated.
According to this overview the optical satellite imagery can be grouped into the following categories:
The Figures below display an overview on the temporal and spatial resolution of the different optical satellite systems:
More information on the currently running satellites and on the planned systems are listed on further web-sites, namely