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Imagery and Remote Sensing

The content of this guide was created by Bob Sathrum, retired 6/2013

Reference Resources

See Aerial Photography and Imagery for guides to repositories of aerial photography and imagery, organized by broad geographic area.

Dictionaries and Encyclopedias


Directories and Guides

  • ASPRS Guide to Land Imaging Satellites (American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing) Directory of all civil land imaging satellites with resolutions equal to or better than 56 meters.
  • Remote Sensing Resources (Remote Sensing Geographic Informations Facility. Center for Biodiverstiy and Conservation and the American Museum of Natural History) Guide to the practical aspects of locating, accessing, visualizing, and processing remotely sensed data, with lots of links to Internet resources.
  • UCS Satellite Database (Union of Concerned Scientists) Database that contains information on over 900 military and commerical satellites. Updated quarterly and available as a downloadable Excel spreadsheet. For each satellite includes name of satellite, country of owner/operator, purpose, type of orbit, launch mass, date of launch, expected lifetime, contractor, and comments

Handbooks and Manuals

  • Earth Observation Handbook (European Space Agency. Committee on Earth Observation Satellites)
  • Manual of Remote Sensing(Ryerson and American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing) 1998 (G 70.6 M36)
    • Vol. 1: Earth Observing Platforms and Sensors (cd-rom only)
    • Vol. 2: Principles and Applications of Imaging Radar
    • Vol. 3: Remote Sensing for the Earth Sciences
  • Remote Sensing Core Curriculum (International Center for Remote Sensing Education)
  • Vol. 1: Introduction to Photo Interpretation and Photogrammetry
  • Vol. 2: Overview of Remote Sensing of the Environment
  • Vol. 3: Introductory Digital Image Processing
  • Vol. 4: Applications in Remote Sensing
  • Vol. 5: K-12 Education

Literature Databases and Bibliographies

  • The Aerial Photo Sourcebook (Collins) 1998 (ref TR 810 C64 ) Includes an extensive bibliography of books and articles on aerial photography applications grouped under 40 subjects.
  • Geobase (HSU Users Only) Indexes journals and other publications in geography, geology, ecology, and related disciplines, including over 75,000 references to remote sensing research from 1980 to the present.
  • GIS Bibliography (ESRI) Indexes references to geographic information systems, science, and technology from journal articles, conference papers, books, and reports. Includes over 8,000 references on remote sensing.
  • NASA Technical Reports Server Provides 1) access to NASA generated and sponsored scientific and technical literature dating from 1917 to the present that is available on NASA technical report servers; and 2) selected aerospace literature on non-NASA servers. Includes some fulltext links. Includes over 13,000 references to remote sensing reports.
  • REmote Sensing On-line Retrieval System (RESORS) (Canada Centre for Remote Sensing) Index to 100,000 remote sensing publications published between 1950 and 1995.
  • Many discipline databases index remote sensing literature as applied to that discipline. See the list of available databases for appropriate indexes. As an example the Wildlife and Ecology Studies Worldwide database includes over 8,000 remote sensing references.

Internet Portals and Gateways

These are specialized subject guides and portals to remote sensing resources and news on the Internet.

NASA Imagery - Humboldt Bay

Humboldt Bay Image