The Otway-Sorell study is part of Infoterra's Global Seeps programme - a multi-phase two year exploration programme to create the definitive offshore seeps database for the worldwide exploration industry. The Otway-Sorell Basin study includes interpretations by Infoterra and Geoscience Australia that correlate multiple seep clusters with regional seismic and gravity datasets. The study provides exciting new evidence on the oil prospectivity of this offshore region.

ACRES acquired Landsat 7 satellite images showing bushfires in northern New South Wales in early October 2000. Fire fighters brought more than 80 bushfires under control, after more than 150,000ha of bushland were burnt. The image on the left was acquired on 2 June 2000. The second image shows the extent of the fires in the region from South West Rocks in the south to Grafton and the Clarence River in the North.

The International Forest Carbon Initiative, IFCI, is part of Australia's contribution to international efforts on reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. It focuses on technology transfer to developing countries by assisting them to implement national carbon accounting schemes modelled on that established by the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency. Key inputs to those accounting schemes are mosaics of the best available satellite scenes in a given year. Collections of these mosaics, spanning periods of at least a decade, are used to determine changes to the extent and type of forest cover. Those characterisations are used to determine net forest carbon flux, which is a significant component of overall carbon flows in tropical countries. In support of these activities, Geoscience Australia manages a project to obtain, process, archive and distribute large volumes of satellite data, initially with a focus on Indonesia and other parts of Asia. Three key changes from 'business as usual' activities were required to process and manage, on a large scale, a satellite data time-series to support the International Forest Carbon Initiative. First, at Geoscience Australia, a new facility known as the Earth Observation Data Store is being developed. Secondly, innovative techniques such as the use of USB Flash Drives for data distribution and of DVDs for quick look catalogue distribution have proved beneficial for the participating agencies in developing countries, as well as for data transfers from regional satellite archives. Thirdly, much of the data, especially the Landsat satellite imagery, has for the first time been made available to the users with minimal restrictions, via the employment of open content licensing known as Creative Commons.

Salt lakes, also known as playa lakes, are a common feature of the Australian landscape, and are a strong indicator of our current and past climates. Despite their abundance they have not been extensively studied in Australia, with little research undertaken since the early benchmark work of the 1970s - 1980s (e.g. Bowler, 1971, 1981) which largely focussed on geomorphologic evolutionary patterns and trends. Notwithstanding, salt lakes contain some of the highest levels biological endemism in Australia (DeDecker, 1983) and their unique, and commonly extreme, chemistry offers the potential for distinctive saline mineralisation and potentially economic concentrations of Li, K, B, REEs, Br and U (e.g. Butt et al. 1984; Nissenbaum, 1993; Orris, 2011).

A multi-agency collaboration between Australian government partners has been working towards making continent-scale, public, web-accessible and GIS-compatible ASTER geoscience maps. CSIRO along with Geoscience Australia and several state government agencies, (including GSWA, GSQ, DMITRE and NTGS), have developed methodology and produced 15 geoscientific products, with applications for mineral mapping and exploration, soil-mapping, environment and agricultural sectors. This work represents the largest ASTER mosaic of this type in the world and sets a new benchmark for state-to-continent scale spectral remote sensing. The project is supported both nationally and internationally by the ASTER Science Team, ERSDAC, NASA and the USGS. Outcomes include the formation of a platform for establishing national standards; geoscience product nomenclature; processing methods; accuracy assessments; and traceable documentation. Detailed product notes outline these standards and provide significant knowledge transfer for existing and new users of this type of data. Hyperion satellite hyperspectral imagery has been critical for calibration and validation of the processed ASTER data, reduction to 'surface' reflectance using independent validation data such as Hyperion, and calculating statistics to generate regression coefficients, reduces errors in the ASTER instrument and increases reliability and corroboration of spectral responses.

Australia has been receiving Earth Observations from Space (EOS) for over 50 years. Meteorological imagery dates from 1960 and Earth observation imagery from 1979. Australia has developed world-class scientific, environmental and emergency management EOS applications. However, in the top fifty economies of the world, Australia is one of only three nations which does not have a space program. The satellites on which Australia depends are supplied by other countries which is a potential problem due to Australia having limited control over data continuity and data access. The National Remote Sensing Technical Reference Group (NRSTRG) was established by Geoscience Australia as an advisory panel in 2004. It represents a cross-section of the remote sensing community and is made up of representatives from government, universities and private companies. Through the NRSTRG these parties provide Geoscience Australia with advice on technical and policy matters related to remote sensing. In February 2009 the NRSTRG met for a day specifically to discuss Australia's reliance on EOS, with a view to informing the development of space policy. This report is the outcome of that meeting. Australia has some 92 programs dependent on EOS data. These programs are concerned with environmental issues, natural resource management, water, agriculture, meteorology, forestry, emergency management, border security, mapping and planning. Approximately half these programs have a high dependency on EOS data. While these programs are quite diverse there is considerable overlap in the technology and data. Of Australia's EOS dependent programs 71 (77%) are valued between $100,000 and $10 million and 82 (89%) of all these programs have a medium or high dependency on EOS data demonstrating Australia's dependency on space based imaging. Earth observation dependencies within currently active Federal and state government programs are calculated to be worth just over $949 million, calculated by weighting the level of dependency on EOS for each program. This includes two programs greater than $100 million in scale and one program greater than a billion dollars in scale. This document is intended as a summary of Australia's current space and Earth observation dependencies, compiled by the NRSTRG, to be presented to the Federal Government's Space Policy Unit, a section of the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, as an aid to space policy formation.

Normalising for atmospheric, land surface bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) and terrain illumination effects are essential in satellite data processing. It is important both for a single scene when the combination of land cover, sun, view angles and terrain slope angles create anisotropy and for multiple scenes in which the sun angle changes. Geoscience Australia (GA) is establishing a procedure to conduct physically based atmospheric BRDF and terrain illumination correction for moderate spatial resolution satellite imagery (10-100 m) such as Landsat using a coupled atmospheric and BRDF model. In particular, the method is not dependent on the image data, does not need extensive field data, can be applied equally to different environments and used with different sensors in a consistent way. Furthermore, the corrected surface reflectance derived using this method can be used to calibrate and cross-calibrate satellite sensors. More importantly, the normalized reflectance can be used for time series analysis to trace climate change and land cover variation using multiple sensors (including satellite, airborne and ground based). In this paper, we will describe the algorithm being progressed at GA. Preliminary results from the algorithm will be compared with ground based reflectance measurements for selected validation sites. The paper will also discuss how the environmental input data for the model, such as aerosol, water vapour and BRDF parameters are selected and applied.

Pixel Quality Assessment describes the results of a number of quality tests which are used to determine the quality of a Landsat image product in terms of, pixel saturation, pixel contiguity between spectral bands, whether the pixel is over land or sea, cloud contamination, cloud shadow and topographic shadow. Pixel Quality is used to filter an input Landsat image for downstream processing in a production workflow. It has general applicability to a number of image processing scenarios.

Geoscience Australia, ACRES distribute Landsat Multispectral Scanner (MSS), Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) data for a series of epochs or time frames covering Australia. The first epoch is 1972. These data have been produced and provided by the Australian Greenhouse Office (AGO). AGO use the data in their National Carbon Accounting System for monitoring land clearing and revegetation. This data is only available through ACRES and ACRES Landsat Distributors, and not through the AGO. More information is available at <a href="http://www.ga.gov.au/acres/prod_ser/agosuite.jsp">http://www.ga.gov.au/acres/prod_ser/agosuite.jsp</a> This data is available in 1:1M tiles or as a full continental Mosaic. Tiles areas are available at: <a href="http://www.ga.gov.au/acres/prod_ser/agotilemap.jsp">http://www.ga.gov.au/acres/prod_ser/agotilemap.jsp</a>

Geoscience Australia, ACRES distribute Landsat Multispectral Scanner (MSS), Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) data for a series of epochs or time frames covering Australia. The first epoch is 1972. These data have been produced and provided by the Australian Greenhouse Office (AGO). AGO use the data in their National Carbon Accounting System for monitoring land clearing and revegetation. This data is only available through ACRES and ACRES Landsat Distributors, and not through the AGO. More information is available at <a href="http://www.ga.gov.au/acres/prod_ser/agosuite.jsp">http://www.ga.gov.au/acres/prod_ser/agosuite.jsp</a> This data is available in 1:1M tiles or as a full continental Mosaic. Tiles areas are available at: <a href="http://www.ga.gov.au/acres/prod_ser/agotilemap.jsp">http://www.ga.gov.au/acres/prod_ser/agotilemap.jsp</a>