Chapter Two

An Overview of Remote-Sensing ISTAs

As of November 1997, a total of 490 ISTAs entered into by the U.S. government were identified as supporting some aspect of U.S. international cooperation in remote sensing and earth observation. These agreements, sometimes called ISTAs, take a number of forms ranging from formal diplomatic treaties signed by Cabinet officers and approved by Congress to informal letters of agreement signed by U.S. government agency officials with no intragovernmental coordination. ISTAs vary in the specificity with which they identify areas for cooperation: framework or umbrella agreements are signed to support broad cooperation between nations, often without specific reference to subject areas; MOUs (or MOAs) support cooperation in a more specific area of science and technology, but also often lack details. Letters of agreement (or intent) and data exchange agreements are often more specific about the cooperation being sponsored and are generally negotiated and signed at the agency level.

Five agencies account for more than 90 percent of the 490 ISTAs identified for this project: in the Department of Commerce, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); in the Department of Defense, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) and Defense Mapping Agency (DMA); in the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS); the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); and in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Forest Service (USFS) (see Table 1). Of the total number of agreements identified, less than 10 percent were approved through a formal interagency process coordinated through the Department of State, known as Circular 175. Of the 490 agreements identified, 45 were listed in the 1995 Department of State Title V report.

Within the catalog of 490 agreements provided here, many agreements clearly specify remote sensing and earth-observation operations or data sharing. Some agreements, however, sponsor activities related to or supporting remote sensing and earth observation but do not reference remote-sensing activities directly. Nevertheless, we judged that these types of agreements should not be eliminated from the catalog, since they constituted important activities that occur within the realm of remote-sensing or earth-observation activities. Accordingly, we split the catalog into two lists: the "A list" includes agreements covering remote-sensing satellite equipment or collection and exchange of data resulting from remote-sensing sources, and the "B list" includes agreements covering supporting activities or activities that appear to rely on remote-sensing sources for data, although this is not explicitly stated.

The A list contains 340 activities, such as the Landsat satellite deployment and ground station activities, the Earth Observing Satellite System, and the ARGOS and GOES weather and ground tracking satellite programs; agreements to launch and deploy satellite hardware technology, to share data under an international satellite-data collection program; and agreements to use remote-sensing data to create maps and charts or to collect weather, biological, and ecological data. Agreements are in place to cover the operations of and data sharing from 32 active satellite systems. NOAA and NASA top the list of agencies with agreements relating to these satellite systems, with 273 and 50 agreements, respectively, as detailed in Table 1. The U.S. Geological Survey is the third agency on the A list, with eight remote-sensing agreements; DoD falls to fourth place under this configuration, with four remote-sensing agreements. Four agencies--the Environmental Protection Agency, USDA/Forest Service, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Smithsonian Institution--have one remote-sensing agreement on the A list.[1]

Table 1

Directly and Indirectly Related International Science and Technology Agreements by Agency


Agency

A Lista

B Listb
Total ISTAs
NOAA
273
12
285
NASA
51
48
99
DoD (USAF and DMA)
4
52
56
DOI (USGS)
8
25
33
USDA (FA)
1
5
6
Department of State
0
4
4
DOE
0
1
1
EPA
1
0
1
Smithsonian Institution
1c
0
1
DOT
0
1
1
FAA
0
1
1
NSF
1
1d
2
Total
340
150
490
aDirectly related agreements.
bIndirectly related or supporting agreements.
cWith USGS.
dWith NASA

Table 1 also shows the delineation by agency of the B list, which contains 150 agreements covering such activities as mapping and charting; balloon launches to calibrate satellites; and data collection to support biological, global climate studies, and weather data when it appears that the data comes from remote-sensing sources. DoD leads the agencies on the B list, with 52 agreements, followed by NASA with 48 and USGS with 25. Four agencies--DOE, State, DOT, and FAA--have only B-list agreements.

International Partners

The United States has remote-sensing agreements in force with 76 countries and six multinational organizations or groups. When all 490 agreements are considered, France, Japan, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom are the United States' most active partners. Figure 1. shows the distribution of agreements by country, with designations made by A list (dark bar) and B list (light bar). Of the 340 A-list activities, the number of international partners drops to 50 countries and five multinational organizations. On the A list, the ordering of our most active partners changes only slightly: France (72 A-list agreements) is the most frequently cited partner. This is largely due to the preeminence of the ARGOS project and the many agreements to conduct research with ARGOS-collected data. Canada, Japan, and Australia (50, 49, and 39 A-level agreements, respectively) are the next most common partners, followed by the United Kingdom (35) and Norway (19).

Figure 1--International Partners

Subjects of Cooperation

The descriptions provided by the agencies of the activities sponsored under ISTAs range from less than a sentence to several or more pages. The agreements themselves do not name a "subject" of cooperation. Reading the various agreements, however, revealed some trends that enabled us to create a list of subject areas. Using this list, the ISTAs were classified, to the extent possible, by tagging them with a subject representing the cooperative activity intended by the ISTA (the full subject list is provided in the appendix). Meteorology is the largest single activity being sponsored, followed by wildlife tracking, ocean studies, and water management. Figure 2 shows the distribution of agreements by subject, with designations made for A list (dark bar) and B list (light bar).

Figure 2--Agreements by Subject

Types of Agreements

Agencies use a variety of terms used to classify ISTAs; during the course of this project, we identified at least ten, including the following:

The majority of agreements identified for this project are classified as Memoranda of agreement (MOAs); the predominance of MOAs is due to the large number of agreements governing cooperation under the ARGOS and GOES programs. Memoranda of understanding (MOUs) appear to be the most formal of the types of agreements the agencies use. MOUs are the most likely to have undergone the Circular 175 process (the formal process for approving international agreements) and are therefore more likely than other types of agreements to be listed in the Department of State's Title V report. NASA uses the term agreement of cooperation to refer to joint agreements. A number of agencies, particularly DoD, use the term data exchange agreement to cover agency-to-agency data sharing arrangements.

[1] RAND recently shed additional light on the use of remote sensing data by U.S. Government agencies through a briefing by Scott Pace and Liam Sarsfield entitled "National Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite System: Cost and Risk Issues" and a report by Scott Pace, Using Intelligence Data for Environmental Needs: Balancing National Interests, Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, MR-799-CMS, 1997.

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