Developed for World Bank Group

Sources

Digital Globe Imagery

Across all the zones examined, Digital Globe’s catalog provided most of the data for the majority of indicators (Land Classification, Building Area, Building Counts, Road Infrastructure). The DG catalog provided the high resolution needed for looking at what are mostly small regions. In addition, the back catalog provides historical analysis, going back to 2002 for some regions. The coverage varies by zone, with some zones having a few dozen cloud free images going back 10-15 years, while a few only have a handful. This is a family of high resolution satellites (0.5 m or better) that include, for this project, GeoEye and Worldview 2 and 3. For most of the sites there are at least a dozen scenes over the last 5 years. Primarily, this is GeoEye and Worldview for earlier dates with WorldView 03 in the last couple years. All of these sensors include Red, Green, Blue, and NIR bands, with Worldview 03 containing additional short wave IR bands. These scenes, their footprints, and thumbnails were searched then visually inspected to exclude cloudy scenes over the zones of interest. Scenes are not directly available -- they must first be 'ordered', then can accessed via GBDX tools or downloaded. Some Digital Globe scenes are made available on a tile service called IDAHO. This also requires a DG account, but the scenes are available immediately as tiles instead of requiring an order. For high resolution applications, these are typically consumed at between zoom level 17-19 (~2m to ~0.5m). Not all of Digital Globe’s imagery is available as IDAHO tiles at this time.