The SLATS project employs integrated information technology that includes satellites orbiting the planet, large capacity unix servers and tape libraries, powerful graphics workstations, through to using satellite position fixing on laptop computers in remote parts of the Queensland outback.

Satellite Platforms

The satellite image data utilised by SLATS dates back to 1972 (Landsat 1) and is regularly acquired by a number of international government and commercially owned and operated satellite platforms orbiting the earth.

These platforms include:

• Landsat Multi Spectral Scanner (MSS)
• Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM)
• Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+)
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
• Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER)
• Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR)

Needing some 89 Landsat scenes to cover all of Queensland at regular intervals since 1972, this represents an investment in excess of $1M in imagery (at current prices).

Computing resources

SLATS require considerable high performance computing resources to process its imagery and manage the huge data volumes involved.

Each Landsat scene is about 300 Megabytes and many intermediate copies of each scene are produced and stored during the various processing stages.

Some mosaic analyses have files over 20 Gigabytes in size.

The data files are served and archived by a SGI Origin 200 computer running SGI's Data Migration Facility (DMF) hierarchical storage management software.

The Origin 200 controls a Storage Technology 9310 tape library consisting of a storage silo and tape robot. The fully automatic silo is populated with about 6,000 magnetic tapes and is shared with other supercomputer systems and has an overall system capacity of some 300 Terabytes (1 Terabyte = 1024 Gigabytes).

A Landsat scene can be retrieved to any workstation in the network in a few minutes. The tape silo also backs up many workstations, including some outside the project where 300 Gigabytes of system backups written in a weekend is typical.

For image processing, the SLATS Scientific team use SGI Origin servers and Microsoft Windows-based workstations running the ERDAS Imagine image processing software combined with the ESRI ArcGIS software.

Field Equipment

Fieldwork data logging is undertaken using specifically adapted GIS software (see Methodology) running through a windows-based laptop computer connected to a Fugro Omnistar DGPS, together with digital photographs of vegetation and change sites.

Regular scheduled safety and location reports are by Optus Mobilesat satellite phone morning and afternoon of every day of field operations.

World's best practice

The usage, optimisation and configuration of this high performance technology mix are leading edge at both the national and international level. Uptime is critical.

SLATS is one of the largest independent public remote sensing projects ever conducted in Australia and has pioneered the way for greatly increased widescale use of Landsat imagery over the entire State.

The total coverage of the State of Queensland, combined with availability of multiple date imagery all registered and rectified to common points, and uniformly radiometrically processed and standardised to the same base, is also a new performance standard in the use of satellite imagery in natural resource management.