Kosovo 1999: SPOT 083-264 - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 66

CLOUDED MEMORY
New York, 2000— SPOT 083-264 was just one scene from the vast quantity of
images that the commercial satellites of 1999 recorded daily and stored in data -
bases. Here is a graphical snapshot of a tiny part of the SPOT database, counting
the passage of the satellites over one particular piece of ground which during the
NATO air campaign came into broader focus: a place to watch over for some, a
target for others. For a little more than eleven weeks, it was examined with almost
every technology available to the military, governments, civil society, and the
news media. But this is a picture of what the satellites saw over ten years, the
ten bloody years of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, which started in Kosovo long
before much of the world even knew what is was or where it was located. The den-
sity of the graph intensifies in 1995 as the war in Bosnia ended and NATO peace -
keepers arrived, and again at the end, when the war finally came to Kosovo.
Go to the SPOT archive and search the database. 38 You can search by longitude
and latitude or by the path and row of the satellite orbit, if you know the pattern.
You can refine your search by date and time and, most importantly, you can limit
your search by the same categories and by the quality of the image. They will not
sell you an image that does not have a rating of “E” for excellent image quality, and
they recommend that you check the cloud coverage—optimally, less than 10 per -
cent is the most desirable for seeing the data in the image.
The database, however, stores everything. And you don't have to limit your
search. The archiving software inserts every image and then classifies it: even the
glitches and the days when the sensors recorded mostly clouds. And so browsing
the database, even at the low resolution of the thumbnails in the online database,
yields a lot of clouds.
And since imaging satellites still cannot see through clouds, the SPOT archive
also constitutes an accurate index of what the very-high-resolution military sat -
ellites could see, too. Clouds. 39 There were only three cloudless days during the
NATO campaign. 40