A Land Imaging Architecture Scorecard to Support Decision-Making

Investment decisions on land imaging data buys, partnering opportunities, technologies, and system acquisition are becoming increasingly complex as the number of Earth-observing satellites increases rapidly, aircraft sensors and unmanned aerial system platforms improve, the community of data providers and users grows, and the pace of technology development, computing, and data storage expansion accelerates. Building on a growing foundation of user needs, the USGS is developing an architecture scorecard system comparing capabilities to user needs to meet the following objectives:  (1) help identify gaps in meeting needs, (2) evaluate proposed and notional land imaging architectures, and (3) study the evolution of enterprise-wide land imaging capability as existing systems reach end of life and new systems become available over timescales of years to a decade. This flexible evaluation system can adapt to changing land imaging needs and capabilities and will evolve from an early, basic capacity to support near-term decisions to increasingly higher fidelity to enable more comprehensive and precise assessments under conditions of increasing complexity. The system will support the evaluation of land imaging systems as standalone capabilities or as suites of capabilities, beginning with a core architecture and expanding to supporting and proposed capabilities. It will be easily adaptable to different evaluative frameworks such as societal benefit areas, organizations, departmental strategic goals and objectives, and technologies (e.g., lidar, radar, optical, satellite, or aircraft).