Older Hawai`i Satellite Imagery

In 1997-1999, several attempts were made to get a good image of the big island, which are now obsoleted by good LandSat7 imagery.

free image from the Remote Image Navigator of the Virtually Hawai`i Project:

• LandSat Multi Spectral Scanner (MSS) images, around 80 meters per pixel, significant clouds
• mosaiced into a single image
• the MSS image of Maui has this caption: "this image is part of a SPOT multispectral image of the Hawaiian Islands. It is shown here at a spatial resolution of 50 m/pixel. If you would like to obtain your own full resolution (20 m/pixel) image, please contact SPOT.."
• not very usable due to cloud coverage, lack of georegistration, weird color balance, low resolution, etc.

from TRIFID

• claimed that you can get 25m LANDSAT imagery, 4 images at $450 ea., merged and color-corrected, for $4360 - fusion with one (10m) SPOT image, $5260
• it turns out that only "recent" LANDSAT is available, at $4500 each

from TerraSystems, Inc. (later STI Services, later gone)

• best color quality available was MSS (red, green, infrared), shifted to try to resemble visible spectrum, merged with panchromatic for detail
• whole island, cloud-free, 10m detail with 20m color resolution, $25,000
• The SPOT data that TerraSystems got has about this much resolution on each band:
  Red: 4-5 bits -> mapped to Red
  Green: 3-5 bits -> mapped to Blue
  Near-IR: 8 bits -> mapped to Green
• delivered data:
  • total size: 13420 * 15273, precisely 10m pixels
  • georegistered to the UTM grid
  • UTM of upper-left-corner:
    • according to first drop: 176722.1, 2244372.0
    • later figure: 214762.1, 2244372.0
• delivery format is TIF, with a TFW (tiff world file) describing the location and scale of each TIF
• second delivery: had data re-sent registered to degree grid
  • NW: 20° 15' 43", -156° 5' 37"
  • NE: 20° 16' 48", -154° 48' 37"
  • SW: 18° 53' 03", -156° 04' 03"
  • SE: 18° 54' 02", -154° 47' 42"
• significant hand-editing still required to:
  • adjust color curves over large areas with completely wrong color balance
  • tedious tweaking in specific areas, occasionally requiring near-total desaturation - e.g.. purple desert and lava fields
  • clean up color-shifted regions: near bodies of water and coastlines
• fourth delivery, in UTM zone 5 coordinates
  •  four sections

    Filename	size	UTM coords of top-left corner
    big_island1.tif	6937 x 7835 pixels	174484	2246386
    big_island2.tif	6939 x 7835 pixels	243844	2246386
    big_island3.tif	6937 x 7837 pixels	174484	2168046
    big_island4.tif	6939 x 7837 pixels	243844	2168046

  • has a black border: left 228, right 229, top 201, bottom 199 pixels
  • after removing border:

    Filename	size	UTM coords of top-left corner
    big_island1.tif	6709 x 7634 pixels	176764	2244376
    big_island2.tif	6710 x 7634 pixels	243844	2244376
    big_island3.tif	6709 x 7638 pixels	176764	2168046
    big_island4.tif	6710 x 7638 pixels	243844	2168046

  • Combined size: 13419 x 15272 @ 10 m/pixel
  • Resized to 8192 x 8192: 16.3 by 18.6 m/pixel
  • Resized to 4096 x 4096: 32.6 by 37.2 m/pixel