Do you know any free satellite imagery for GIS?

Question

Hi!

do you know any imagery that i can get satellite images of places for free??

i thought people who is related to GIS would know it? i searched but i could not find..

i have a terrain editor which uses GIS data for heightmap but i want to texture it with satellite image...

i hope one of you know??

Answer 1

Hi

Trawl the NASA web-sites, they publish a lot of this sort of stuff freely.

Regards

Mark

Answer 2

some source just for satellites - as I understood that you do not need vector data...

open source gis

free gis

Nasa satellite

umiacs

Answer 3

THe USGS Seamless website provides free satellite and aerial imagery. The website is a bit dated (ok, very dated), but it's a good starting point.

Unfortunately, downloading a very large amount of data (such as a full city) is cumbersome.

Answer 4

Many satellite image providers have some example or old data for free, some have a lot, f.ex from Landsat you should be able to find something for most places. If you are not looking for a specific site there should be much to choose from, and you can find higher resolution imagery, e.g QuickBird images at DigitalGlobe.

Probably not all provide stuff for free, but if you Google the different sensors and check their website you should find out. Some other satellite sensors are NOAA, Aqua and Terra MODIS, Terra ASTER, SPOT, Seawifs, ERS, IKONOS.

Answer 5

USGS Seamless with a caveat if you want to grab a whole bunch of data at once...

I'll give you one of the best "secrets" that I learned throughout the years after going through many different pains (leeching scripts, manual clicking, etc). It is an old-school trick... contact a real person there!

For example, the best way do get the NED elevation dataset is to contact USGS's Eros group directly at bulkdatainfo_at_usgs.gov

You send them an external drive and after 4 to 8 weeks (usually much less than that) they will send you the entire dataset that you requested.

Of course, you can always try to click away do grab data through their horrible Web UI.

Also, if all you are looking for is some coarse elevation or NASA marble imagery, the test datasets from Spatialite have imagery and elevation for the entire world :)

Answer 6

• There is a whole blog dedicated to the subject which includes lots and lots of resources
• Depends on the usage, you can use ESRI's map services: "ArcGIS Online standard map services are available at no cost for internal (personal or within an organization) and non-commercial, external use."
• As other have mentioned there are online services that enable you to view sat. imagery all over the world, although downloading all the actual data might be tricky. USGS and ResMap are in this category.