Remote Sensing & Satellite Imagery Coordinate Systems

Satellite Spatial Reference Overview

  • UTM Tiling System: Sentinel-2 and Landsat optical bands are distributed in standard 100x100 km MGRS/UTM tile grids referenced to WGS84.
  • Orthorectification & DEMs: Raw satellite imagery contains terrain displacement errors. DEM elevation data is applied via RPCs (Rational Polynomial Coefficients) to shift pixels to true ground coordinates.

1. Aligning Satellite Imagery with Web Maps

When serving Earth Observation (EO) rasters over Web Mercator tiles (EPSG:3857), rasters must be reprojected from native UTM zones to avoid boundary tears.