Global Fiducials and the U.S. Geological Survey

Abstract:

Using Intelligence Community (IC) imagery assets for science is not new. The first generation of U.S. photo intelligence satellites began collecting imagery of Earth’s surface in 1960. Within a few years, the US Geological Survey (USGS) was granted access to this imagery to enhance its topographic mapping. In 1975, a Presidential Order by Gerald Ford established the Civil Application Committee (CAC), chaired by the USGS, to ensure that certain Federal-Civil Agencies had access to these classified remotely-sensed assets to meet their statutory missions in ways that did not threaten the civil rights, civil liberties, and personal privacy of US citizens.

In 1994, the CIA created MEDEA, an academia-IC partnership designed to augment certain IC activities with external scientific expertise. MEDEA established the Global Fiducials Program (GFP) to acquire U.S. National Imagery System (USNIS) sensor imagery of ‘Fiducial Sites’ for future science exploitation. A ‘Fiducial Site’ was one of ~200 benchmark locations selected for long-term monitoring of Earth’s global environmental change.

For >25 years, panchromatic, high-resolution, imagery time-series have been systematically collected by USNIS sensors at these Fiducial Sites. Initially, the CAC provided logistic support to MEDEA and the GFP. In 1997, the CAC began to develop its own new Fiducial Sites and the Global Fiducials Library (GFL), an archive for Fiducials imagery. Since 2001, the CAC has managed the GFP, currently with more than 500 locations where state-of-the-art imagery is collected for monitoring and research related to climate and global change, Earth surface and environmental processes, and natural hazards and disasters.

In 2009, USGS began to produce publicly releasable imagery products derived from GFL imagery. Today, ~10,000 images from >150 Fiducial locations are available at no cost from the USGS EarthExplorer website (https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/). The website also provides access to ~1,000,000 declassified IC images collected by Corona, Hexagon, and Keyhole satellites between 1960 and 1984. Many current ‘Fiducial Site’ locations were imaged with these sensors, allowing extension of some GFP imagery time-series to six decades.