About Ground Truth Asia

Ground Truth Asia is an independent online magazine about satellite remote sensing applied to the Asian continent. It follows the data, the applications and the people: the archives and national fleets that image the region, the flood, crop, urban and air-quality maps built from them, and the validation culture and conference community that keep those maps honest. The magazine is written in English for a regional and international readership, and it publishes practical guides rather than news bulletins, pieces meant to stay useful longer than a season.

What the magazine covers

The coverage is organised in three sections. The first, introduced by the guide to choosing satellite data for work in Asia, deals with the material: the free international archives, the Asian national satellite programmes and the geostationary weather fleet that watches the region every ten minutes. The second, introduced by the section on land, water and cities, follows the applications: monsoon flood mapping, rice paddy monitoring, megacity growth and the atmospheric record of pollution that crosses the region's borders. The third, introduced by the section on methods and community, covers the craft: field validation, the free software traditions that carry the work, the annual Asian Conference on Remote Sensing and the proceedings archive it has produced since 1980.

How the articles are written

Every guide is written to the same standard. Each states plainly what the satellites can observe and what they cannot, since overstatement is the field's commonest failure. Each names its limits and uncertainties rather than burying them, following the validation discipline the magazine documents in the guide to ground truth. Each links to public sources readers can check themselves: the open data portals, agency pages and archives where the underlying imagery and records live. Facts about programmes and dates are checked against the agencies' own publications, and where a claim cannot be verified, it is not made.

Who the magazine is for

The intended reader works with Asian satellite data or depends on those who do: analysts in agencies and institutes, students entering the field, journalists and administrators who need to understand what a satellite map can support, and practitioners in neighbouring disciplines, hydrology, urban planning, agriculture, atmospheric science, who meet remote sensing at their borders. No prior specialism is assumed beyond a general technical literacy, and every guide begins from the question a working reader would actually ask.

The magazine's position

Ground Truth Asia is a third-party publication. It has no affiliation with the Asian Association on Remote Sensing, the Japan Meteorological Agency, the European Copernicus programme or any other body whose work it describes, and it claims none. Where the magazine discusses the association's conference and proceedings, as in the guide to the ACRS conference, it does so as an outside observer directing readers to the primary sources. Editorial and legal details are stated on the legal notice page, and corrections or suggestions are welcome through the contact page.