Abstract
Turkey is a county that experiences rapid socioeconomic development, which, in turn, leads to high urbanization rates due to migration of people from rural to urban areas, many large-scale development projects (e.g. highways, dams, housing and infrastructure), and environmental problems that adversely affect agriculture, such as soil erosion and deforestation. Furthermore, Turkey lies in a region prone to natural disasters, especially earthquakes, landslides, flooding and forest fires. Successfully overcoming these challenges requires continuous monitoring to enable rapid response as well as the development of effective socioeconomic policies. In this regard, space-based earth observation (EO) systems play a critical role in the rapid acquisiton and extraction of crucial information. The first launch of the first Turkish-designed satellite, RASAT, in 2011 led to the wide-spread exploitation of space-based resources by Turkish institutions through the dissemination of EO data on an open and free basis via the GEZGIN internet portal (http://www.gezgin.gov.tr). The push for data sharing was further instigated by the nationally funded project GEOPORTAL (“Satellite Image Processing and Geoportal Development Project”) and European Union FP7 project EOPOWER (“Earth Observation for Economic Empowerment”), which strove to create conditions for sustainable economic development through the increased use of Earth observation products and services for environmental applications. In this work, the technical challenges involving processing and preparing raw satellite data for dissemination as well as software design of the GEZGIN Portal will be presented.
Highlights
With the launch of the Turkey’s first nationally designed satellite, RASAT on August 27, 2011 (Kahraman et al 2012), and a higher resolution earth observation satellite, Göktürk-2, on December 18, 2012, (Işık et al 2015) wide-spread exploitation of spacebased resources by Turkish institutions became possible for the first time
Based upon work comparing a variety of pansharpening algorithms on RASAT imagery (Teke et al 2014), it was found that the Hyperspherical Color Sharpening (HCS) algorithm yielded the best results
Radiometric calibration is essential to ensuring the quality of data obtained from space assets as well as the inter-operability of data obtained from different satellites, especially for earth observation applications
Summary
With the launch of the Turkey’s first nationally designed satellite, RASAT on August 27, 2011 (Kahraman et al 2012), and a higher resolution earth observation satellite, Göktürk-2, on December 18, 2012, (Işık et al 2015) wide-spread exploitation of spacebased resources by Turkish institutions became possible for the first time. To fully take advantage of this data, a means for quick and effective dissemination was required. The design and development of the imagery data sharing platform, GEZGIN, is described in detail, along with the automated image processing algorithms incorporated into the software. The contribution of the GEZGIN platform to the socioeconomic development of Turkey and, on a regional-scale, to Europe is discussed
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