Satellite imagery in the context of NASA WorldWind

A metropolitan area or metro is a region consisting of a densely populated urban agglomeration and its surrounding territories which share industries, commercial areas, transport network, infrastructure and housing. A metropolitan area usually comprises multiple principal cities, jurisdictions and municipalities: neighborhoods, townships, boroughs, cities, towns, exurbs, suburbs, counties, districts and even states and nations in areas like the eurodistricts. As social, economic and political institutions have changed, metropolitan areas have become key economic and political regions.

In the United States, metropolitan areas are delineated around the core of a core based statistical area, which is defined as an urban area and includes central and outlying counties. In other countries metropolitan areas are sometimes anchored by one central city such as the Paris metropolitan area (Paris). In other cases, metropolitan areas contain multiple centers of equal or close to equal importance, especially in the United States; for example, the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area has eight principal cities. The Islamabad–Rawalpindi metropolitan area in Pakistan, the Rhine-Ruhr in Germany, and the Randstad in The Netherlands are other examples.

Sardinia (/sɑːrˈdɪniə/ sar-DIN-ee-ə; Sardinian: Sardigna [saɾˈdiɲːa]; Italian: Sardegna [sarˈdeɲɲa] ), officially the Autonomous Region of Sardinia, is the second largest island in the Mediterranean Sea after Sicily, and one of the twenty regions of Italy. It is located 200 km west of the Italian Peninsula, 200 km north of Tunisia, and 16.45 km south of the French island of Corsica. Sardinia is one five Italian regions with statutory domestic autonomy. It is divided into six provinces and two metropolitan cities. Cagliari is the capital and largest city, followed by Sassari. It has over 1.5 million inhabitants as of 2025.

Sardinia's indigenous language and the Algherese dialect of Catalan are recognized by both regional and national law as two of Italy's twelve official linguistic minorities, albeit gravely endangered; regional law provides some degree of protection and recognition of the island's other minority languages: the Corsican-influenced Sassarese and Gallurese, and Tabarchino Ligurian.

Topography is the study of forms and features of land surfaces. The topography of an area may refer to landforms and features themselves, or a description or depiction in maps.

Topography is a field of geoscience and planetary science, and is concerned with local detail in general, including not only relief, but also natural, artificial, and cultural features such as roads, land boundaries, and buildings. In the United States, topography often means specifically relief, even though the USGS topographic maps record not just elevation contours, but also roads, populated places, structures, land boundaries, and so on.

The Southern Levant is a geographical region that corresponds approximately to present-day Israel, Palestine, and Jordan; some definitions also include southern Lebanon, southern Syria and the Sinai Peninsula. As a strictly geographical description, it is sometimes used by archaeologists and historians to avoid the religious and political connotations of other names for this area.

Like much of Southwestern Asia, the Southern Levant is an arid region consisting mostly of desert and dry steppe, with a thin strip of wetter, temperate climate along the Mediterranean coast. Geographically it is dominated by the Jordan Valley, a section of the Great Rift Valley bisecting the region from north to south, and containing the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan River and the Dead Sea—the lowest point on the Earth's land surface.

Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application developed by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets (Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and route planning for traveling by foot, car, bike, air (in beta) and public transportation. As of 2020, Google Maps was being used by over one billion people every month around the world.

Google Maps began as a C++ desktop program developed by brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen, Stephen Ma and Noel Gordon in Australia at Where 2 Technologies. In October 2004, the company was acquired by Google, which converted it into a web application. After additional acquisitions of a geospatial data visualization company and a real-time traffic analyzer, Google Maps was launched in February 2005. The service's front end utilizes JavaScript, XML, and Ajax. Google Maps offers an API that allows maps to be embedded on third-party websites, and offers a locator for businesses and other organizations in numerous countries around the world. Google Map Maker allowed users to collaboratively expand and update the service's mapping worldwide but was discontinued from March 2017. However, crowdsourced contributions to Google Maps were not discontinued as the company announced those features would be transferred to the Google Local Guides program, although users that are not Local Guides can still contribute.

An orthophoto, orthophotograph, orthoimage or orthoimagery is an aerial photograph or satellite imagery geometrically corrected ("orthorectified") such that the scale is uniform: the photo or image follows a given map projection. Unlike an uncorrected aerial photograph, an orthophoto can be used to measure true distances, because it is an accurate representation of the Earth's surface, having been adjusted for topographic relief, lens distortion, and camera tilt.

Orthophotographs are commonly used in geographic information systems (GIS) as a "map accurate" background image. An orthorectified image differs from rubber sheeted rectifications as the latter may accurately locate a number of points on each image but stretch the area between so scale may not be uniform across the image. A digital elevation model (DEM) or topographic map is required to create an orthophoto, as distortions in the image due to the varying distance between the camera/sensor and different points on the ground need to be corrected. An orthoimage and a "rubber sheeted" image can both be said to have been georeferenced; however, the overall accuracy of the rectification varies. Software can display the orthophoto and allow an operator to digitize or place linework, text annotations or geographic symbols (such as hospitals, schools, and fire stations). Some software can process the orthophoto and produce the linework automatically.

Imagery intelligence (IMINT), pronounced as either as Im-Int or I-Mint, is an intelligence gathering discipline wherein imagery is analyzed (or "exploited") to identify information of intelligence value. Imagery used for defense intelligence purposes is generally collected via satellite imagery or aerial photography.

As an intelligence gathering discipline, IMINT production depends heavily upon a robust intelligence collection management system. IMINT is complemented by non-imaging MASINT electro-optical and radar sensors.

The Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) is a project from the European Commission that creates global geographical data about the evolution of human habitation on Earth. This in the form of population density maps, built-up maps, and settlement maps. This information is produced using new geographic data mining tools and knowledge and analytics based on empirical data.

The GHSL processing framework uses a range of data, including census data, archives of fine-scale global satellite imagery, and voluntarily provided geographic information. Data is processed automatically to produce analytics and knowledge that methodically and objectively describe the existence of people and developed infrastructure. The GHSL maps human presence on Earth, sourcing information from 1975 and up to 2030.

The São Paulo Macrometropolis (Portuguese: Macrometrópole de São Paulo) or São Paulo Megalopolis (Portuguese: Megalópole de São Paulo), also known as Expanded Metropolitan Complex (Portuguese: Complexo Metropolitano Expandido), is a Brazilian megalopolis that emerged through the existing process of conurbation between the metropolitan areas located around the Greater São Paulo, with more than 30 million inhabitants, or 74 percent of São Paulo State's population, and is one of the most populous urban agglomerations in the world.

Beyond the Greater São Paulo, the megalopolis encompasses the metropolitan areas of Campinas, Baixada Santista, Sorocaba, Vale do Paraíba e Litoral Norte, Jundiaí and Piracicaba. The total population of these areas added to the state capital exceeds 31.5 million inhabitants, or about 75% of the population of the entire state of São Paulo.

A polder (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈpɔldər] ) is a low-lying tract of land that forms an artificial hydrological entity, enclosed by embankments known as dikes. The three types of polder are:

1. Land reclaimed from a body of water, such as a lake or the seabed
2. Flood plains separated from the sea or river by a dike
3. Marshes separated from the surrounding water by a dike and subsequently drained; these are also known as koogs, especially in Germany

The ground level in drained marshes subsides over time. All polders will eventually be below the surrounding water level some or all of the time. Water enters the low-lying polder through infiltration and water pressure of groundwater, or rainfall, or transport of water by rivers and canals. This usually means that the polder has an excess of water, which is pumped out or drained by opening sluices at low tide. Care must be taken not to set the internal water level too low. Polder land made up of peat (former marshland) will sink in relation to its previous level, because of peat decomposing when exposed to oxygen from the air.

The Landsat program is the longest-running enterprise that has acquired satellite imagery of Earth. It is a joint NASA / USGS program. On 23 July 1972, the Earth Resources Technology Satellite was launched. This was eventually renamed to Landsat 1 in 1975. The most recent, Landsat 9, was launched on 27 September 2021.

The instruments on the Landsat satellites have acquired millions of images. The images, archived in the United States and at Landsat receiving stations around the world, are a unique resource for global change research and applications in agriculture, cartography, geology, forestry, regional planning, surveillance, and education, and can be viewed through the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) "EarthExplorer" website. Landsat 7 data has eight spectral bands with spatial resolutions ranging from 15 to 60 m (49 to 197 ft); the temporal resolution is 16 days. Landsat images are usually divided into scenes for easy downloading. Each Landsat scene is about 115 miles long and 115 miles wide (or 100 nautical miles long and 100 nautical miles wide, or 185 kilometers long and 185 kilometers wide).

The Northern Levant is a geographical region in the Eastern Mediterranean, encompassing the northern part of the Levant, between the Mediterranean in the west and the eastern deserts, going south as far as Lebanon's Litani River. It corresponds approximately to the modern-day southern Turkish coastal province of Hatay, Syria excluding the desert northeast of the Euphrates, and Lebanon except for its southern part. A defining feature is the northern section of the Syro-African Rift starting at the Marash triple junction.

GeoEye Inc. (formerly Orbital Imaging Corporation, or ORBIMAGE) was an American commercial satellite imagery company based in Herndon, Virginia. GeoEye was merged into the DigitalGlobe corporation on January 29, 2013.

The company was founded in 1992 as a division of Orbital Sciences Corporation in the wake of the 1992 Land Remote Sensing Policy Act which permitted private companies to enter the satellite imaging business. The division was spun off in 1997. It changed its name to GeoEye in 2006 after acquiring Denver, Colorado-based Space Imaging Corporation for $58 million. Space Imaging was founded and controlled by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. Its principal asset was the IKONOS satellite; the company was founded in the 1990s for the purpose of managing the project that became the IKONOS satellite.

Cloud condensation nuclei (CCNs), also known as cloud seeds, are small particles typically 0.2 μm, or one hundredth the size of a cloud droplet. CCNs are a unique subset of aerosols in the atmosphere on which water vapour condenses. This can affect the radiative properties of clouds and the overall atmosphere. Water vapour requires a non-gaseous surface to make the transition to a liquid; this process is called condensation.

In the atmosphere of Earth, this surface presents itself as tiny solid or liquid particles called CCNs. When no CCNs are present, water vapour can be supercooled at about −13 °C (9 °F) for 5–6 hours before droplets spontaneously form. This is the basis of the cloud chamber for detecting subatomic particles.

Intelligence, or simply "Intel," refers to primary information and data gathered, evaluated, assessed, analyzed, and interpreted by members of the intelligence field to provide insight into the power projection, intentions, and activities of adversarial, neutral, and allied governments, organizations, or individuals. Unlike raw data, intelligence is processed and contextualized through the intelligence cycle to support decision-making in areas such as national defense, diplomacy, law enforcement, and security operations. This information can be sourced from many areas and can take many forms, including reports, intercepted communications, satellite imagery, or human-sourced observations—and is used to anticipate threats, assess risks, and guide strategic planning.

Phases of the intelligence cycle under intelligence cycle management and other phases of intelligence include;