In FY11, the USGS Land Remote Sensing Program and USDA Foreign Agricultural Service partnered to acquire moderate resolution SPOT satellite imagery over a large portion of North America to supplement imagery acquired by the Landsat program. This purchase is referred to as the North American Data Buy (NADB). All imagery received through this mechanism are licensed for use by the Federal civil government, state governments, local governments and tribal governments as well as their project specific partners. The figure shows the area of coverage where imagery is directly downlinked and made available to users within hours of reception. DOI bureaus utilized over 5000 of the more than 80,000 SPOT 4 and SPOT 5 scenes obtained through the NADB in FY11 with USGS, USFWS and NPS the most frequent users.
The North American Data Buy area of interest (yellow outline) and the region that EROS can directly downlink data from the SPOT satellites (dashed magenta outline)