Jubilee for European Space Imaging VHR Satellite Data

For the 10th consecutive year, European Space Imaging (EUSI) is supporting the European Commission in the Controls with Remote Sensing programme (CwRS) with timely delivery of Very High-Resolution (VHR) satellite data. The annual CwRS campaign involves around 1,000 images. In total, more than 240,000 square kilometres are covered each year as part of the programme.

The EUSI has supplied data for an annually increasing number of control sites, resulting in a total of 339 sites collected in 2012, totalling more than 170,000 square kilometres.

Since the use of VHR satellite data became operational in 2004, EUSI has been the most reliable data supplier with success rates close or equal to 100% every year. The company has provided the majority of all VHR data to the programme and contributed more than two thirds of the data in the past nine campaigns.

With the addition of new satellites, data products and processing techniques, the requirements of the member states and the JRC have evolved over the duration of the campaign. As a result EUSI has expanded its offering and services to accommodate the changing technical and image collection requirements. Some of these include:

- Co-ordinated collections across a satellite constellation using a combination of direct and indirect tasking

- Technical feasibility assessments

- Image collection planning and image validation

- Manual cloud cover assessment

- Project specific acquisition notifications

- Quality control and order administration.

About CwRS

Since 1993, the European Commission (EC) has promoted the use of “Controls with Remote Sensing” (CwRS) as a system to control agricultural subsidies granted under the EC’s Common Agricultural Policy.Following the real time evaluation in 2003 and the successful operational application since 2004, the EC’s Joint Research Centre (DG JRC), in agreement with DG AGRI, provides VHR satellite remote sensing data, to the EU Member States (MS) administrations for their CwRS area-based subsidies.

Since 2010, VHR Imagery acquired under the CwRS Campaign has also been used for the quality assessment of the Land Parcel Identification System – which is the main geo-database in the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS - the main administration tool for managing of farmers' applications).

DG JRC provides technical guidance regarding the CwRS strategy as well as managing the image acquisition, ordering and communication with the MS administrations and image providers. Also, in close cooperation with the MS, it supports the definition of the imagery required.