China started to apply Earth observation satellites in the 1970s and has expanded applications to crop yield estimation, weather forecasting, disaster monitoring, resource exploration, ocean study, environment monitoring, and urban planning. Recently, several integrated Earth observation application systems were built for dynamic information services of resource and environment, natural disaster monitoring and assessment, and ocean environment stereoscopic monitoring.

1) The applications of meteorological satellite
The meteorological satellites provide hourly and daily cloud images, cloud top and temperature information to weather forecasting, disastrous weather forecasting, climate analysis and research, long term weather forecasting, sea ice mapping, global environment monitoring, Typhoon monitoring etc. FY-1C has been stably operated and continually provided data to users since its launch in 1999, the World Meteorology Organization announced the formal acceptance of FY-1C as the world operational polar-orbit meteorological satellite in August 2000. FY-1C serves free images to users around the world.

2) Agriculture remote sensing
China has established a National Agriculture Monitoring & Crop Yield Estimation System, which is currently providing crop growth monitoring and yield estimation services nationwide. The system uses remote sensing data from meteorological satellites, resource satellites and radar satellites and successfully combined satellite remote sensing technology with traditional agricultural techniques. The accuracy of the crop yield estimation is about 90 %.

Crop Yield Estimation System Using Remote Sensing

A map of crop growth monitoring using remote sensing techniques

3) Forest resource inventory
China has a lot of experiences in forest resource inventories using Earth observation technologies. Combining remotely sensed data with ground observations, China has built up a national forest resource inventory system to provide operational services.

A forest resource distribution map of China produced by using RS & GIS techniques

In the national forest resource inventory, using re-sampling method and TM image, investigators can precisely identify the sampling parcels.

4) Geology and mineral resource inventory
Remote sensing technology is widely used in regional geological mapping and mineral resource inventory. About 200 km2 of regional geological maps at a scale of 1:50000 and a national geological map of 1:250000 have been produced. Chinese researchers discovered a large gold mine in Xinjiang region by using remote sensing techniques. In addition, China also applied the interferometric SAR technology to detect earthquakes and to monitor the environment changes in Three Gorges region and the ground sinking in oil fields.

5) Remote Sensing for urban planning
The high-resolution remote sensing images have great potential in urban applications, such as urban designing and planning, transportation planning, urban expansion assessment, urban green belt investigation, heat island identification, air quality and ecological environment monitoring, urban land resource inventory and land use change detection etc.

The CBERS image used for land resource inventory and land use change detection in Shenzhen, South China.