Obtaining Satellite Images

satimage

There is a wealth of satellite imagery of earth available, but it's not always obvious how or where to obtain those images. Quite a lot of imagery is available for free and free imagery usually offers a good starting point for any new project. Commercial imagery is often available at higher resolutions and commercial satellites will often pass over your point of interest more frequently.

Source of Free Imagery

Copernicus Open Access Hub

The Copernicus programme is a cooperation of the European Union and the European Space Agency (ESA) for Earth observation. ESA coordinates the acquisition and delivery of Earth observation data from space. Starting with Sentinel-1A in 2014, the Sentinel series of satellites delivers a wide range of Earth Observation (EO) data for environmental and civil purposes.

The Copernicus Open Access Hub provides complete, free and open access to Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3 and Sentinel-5P user products. Both graphical User Interfaces and API access to the data are available.

Copernicus also provides access to the data to other providers and the user interfaces of some of the other providers are easier to use.

Sentinel Hub

Sentinel Hub provides a cloud API for Satellite Imagery. As well as access to data from the Sentinel satellites, Sentinel Hub offers access to Landsat and and other data, including some commercial satellite providers. They offer free and various levels of paid plans, depending on use cases. They have an Earth Observation online browser that makes it one of the easier services to use when selecting and downloading EO data.

USGS Earth Explorer

EarthExplorer (EE) provides online search, browse display, metadata export, and data download for earth science data from the archives of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). EE provides an online user interface for searching, viewing, and downloading data.

As well as access to Satellite data from Landsat, EE provides access to historical data from other USGS and NASA satellite missions, as well as aerial photography. EE also offers access to ESA and ISRO data, as well as data from some commercial providers. The breadth of data available can be overwhelming and the user interface is not the most user friendly.

Google Earth Engine

Google Earth Engine hosts satellite imagery and stores it in a public data archive that includes historical earth images going back more than forty years. The images, ingested on a daily basis, are then made available for global-scale data mining.

Earth Engine also provides APIs and other tools to enable the analysis of large datasets.

Other Sources

While the above selection will get you started, there are many other source of EO data, free and commercial. We think the above selection provides good global coverage and are among the easier to use. Some notable others include:-