DLR’s Activities to Support the GEO Supersite Initiative with TerraSAR-X Data

Kurzfassung

In this contribution we explain the mechanisms implemented by DLR to support the GEO Supersite initiative by providing TerraSAR-X data to the community at reduced cost and simplified access procedures. The Supersites are an initiative of the Group of Earth Observations (GEO) to study natural hazards in geologically active regions using information from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), GNSS, geophysical models and other data sources. The data are provided in the spirit of GEO, ESA, NASA and DLR that easy access to Earth science data will promote their use and advance scientific research, ultimately leading to improved geo-risk modelling and the prediction of hazards. Seven Supersites have been defined initially with different threat mechanisms: Hawaii (volcanic), Vancouver (tectonic), Los Angeles (tectonic), Etna (volcanic), Vesuvius (volcanic), Istanbul (tectonic) and Tokyo (tectonic). Triggered by tragic earthquakes, additional sites such as Port’o Prince (Haiti, 2010) and Tohoku-oki (Japan, 2011) have been recently added to the list. The TerraSAR-X mission is carried out under a public-private partnership (PPP) between the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung; BMBF), the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) and Astrium GmbH. DLR is responsible for the scientific usage of the data (http://sss.terrasar-x.dlr.de/), and it takes care of design, implementation and operation of the mission. Data for commercial use are made available through Astrium GEO-Information Services GmbH (http://www.infoterra.de/). The satellite’s total data-collecting capacity is divided equally between science and industry. In order to support research in the geo-risk domain, DLR allocated a quota of TerraSAR-X products to the Geo-supersite intitiative that will be provided free of charge. It mainly utilizes the data provision mechanism in place applicable for tscientific applications (AO) in order to satisfy as well the German Satellite Data Security Act (SATDSiG) as to protect the commercial interests of the PPP. For each Supersite, a dedicated principal investigator takes care of - justifying the scientific use of the requested data in the AO proposal, - SAR data acquisition planning, - negotiation of acquisition requests in case of conflicts with other scientists, - acquisition planning and - regular reporting. For the task of data ordering the PI gets a special account in DLR’s Science Service System with low priority but rather large number of scenes free of charge that will used for filling the archive. In order to work with the data, the scientists write a simplified AO proposal with reference to the supersite AO proposal. He may the order a certain number of scenes from the catalogue for free. This mechanism has already proven successful at some supersites and first results are available, e.g. from Hawaii, Haiti and Tohoku-oki. For the latter, a time sequence of TerraSAR-X data is currently being acquired and jointly released to the public by DLR and Astrium GEO-Information Services GmbH in an even more simplified procedure. An overview of DLR’s supersite process and first scientific results are given in the presentation.