Page 178 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 3

CPS1985 Markus Z.
economic indicators. Different existing satellite data were proofed for
describing observable economic activities. High resolution satellite and non-
space (e.g. airborne and seaborne) data contains valuable information for
business cycle analysis. For example, activities at harbours, airports or
industrial facilities can be observed. A set of statistical indicators based on
these data can give first signs of the possible changes in the economy and
therefore to provide information to the government to take appropriate
measures, for example, against overheating of the economy at the earlier
stage.
The PoC SBCS has shown that nearly real-time business cycle statistics
based on satellite data are possible. Furthermore, the indicators describing
business cycles could be developed as cross-border indicators. A lot of
economic activities do not stop at national frontiers. Connected economic
areas are cross-border (see Taubenböck et al 2017). With these characteristics,
SBCS will expand the information content fundamentally compared to
currently used business cycle indicators.
The starting point of the PoC SBCS was data coming from the Copernicus
Programme of the European Space Agency
(https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus).
Especially the images of the Sentinel 2 satellites were of key interest at the
beginning. Copernicus is an Earth observation program directed by the
European Commission in partnership with the European Space Agency, which
includes the Sentinel missions. Sentinel-2 delivers multispectral satellite
images, which have a spatial resolution of 10 m. The Sentinel-2 mission
consists of two satellites through which the Earth can be observed every 5
days. The main advantage of using Sentinel-2 is its free and open data policy.
However, the spatial resolution of 10 m does not allow detecting some of the
objects necessary, such as cars or containers. The lessons learned from the
PoC SBCS is first of all that the current free of charge available satellite data
are not good enough to detect smaller objects related to economic activities.
On the other hand, there are a lot of high quality data at the information
market but this data are still quite expensive (Cao et al 2016). An overview of
some of the more commonly used Earth Observation satellites in terms of
spatial resolution and revisit time is shown in Figure 1. With the further
technical progress the price for nearly real time and high-resolution satellite
images will probably decrease.

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