trong>Narrator: This is Science Today. A unique partnership between the University of California , Santa Barbara and a private satellite imagery company called Terra Image USA , will have a major impact on research that utilizes satellite imagery. David Siegel directs the campus' Institute for Computational Earth System Science, which is the lead university institute involved in the partnership.

Siegel: The focus of the group is really on Earth world remote sensing and how to use those data sets to understand how the Earth system is changing over time. There are people who are interested in using it to look at land cover changes; to look at agriculture distributions; to look at gas fluxes from land; snow; city growth; population modeling; hydrological modeling; storm run-off – there's hundreds of hundreds of applications.

Narrator: Siegel says access to such high-resolution, commercial satellite imagery was too exorbitant for researchers.

Siegel: Traditionally, academic users, especially in the U.S. , have had no access to this data. And this is one of these great opportunities that we can change the face of science.

Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.