Jérome Soubirane
SPOT Product Manager, Geo-Intelligence
Airbus Defence and Space
France

Biography
Jérôme Soubirane, graduated with one Master Degree in Geophysics and one Master Degree in Hydrogeology. He began his career in the national office of Geological and Mining Survey (BRGM, France) in remote sensing unit. He joined Airbus Group in 2000 as an expert in radar imaging. Its activity has since evolved initially to applications project management (defense, crisis management and emergency response) and then to marketing as SPOT serie product manager since 2011.

Abstract
Go Monitor: Intensive Monitoring Thanks To Astrium Constellation

Space is a wonderful viewpoint to monitor free-of-risk and cost-effectively activities happening on Earth. However, determining which satellite is best to track changes that matter to a given user can result challenging and time-consuming, and the complexity – and cost – increases with the number of places to be monitored. To solve this, Astrium has set up the GO Monitor web-service, to raise alerts whenever something relevant to the user is happening on the ground. For him / her, being aware of change is as easy as receiving an email on his / her laptop every time something is happening over his / her area of interest. Depending on the wished monitoring frequency, the activity type, the coverage extend, the level of detail and the weather / light condition, one / several given sensor(s) / mode will be activated to fulfil the requirement: Combining radar and optical satellites improves monitoring frequency and completeness. As TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X and PAZ pass early morning or late evening, they provide a different picture to that of Pléiades and SPOT’s daily display around midday. In addition, radar is weather-independent and a coherence / amplitude analysis enables early detection of activities that may not be visible in optical imagery. Last, Astrium constellation enables tracking from the smallest changes (50cm product resolution in optical / up to 25cm in radar) up to the big picture (areas as big as 330 x 300 km covered daily at 1.5m resolution). The overall aim of this paper is to describe the benefits of the innovative features of Astrium Constellation, so as to assess their combined potential in terms of monitoring. Specific care will be brought to describe the capabilities in terms of early warning and forecast. Based on real-life examples, the paper will lead the analysis on the performances offered by GO Monitor, in a variety of applications ranging from Defence up to Forestry and Mining. The analysis will be extended in the perspective of SPOT 7 and PAZ launches, coherently operated with the currently working systems to guarantee the right level information at the right time.