The Civil Applications Committee: Intelligence and Defense Imagery for Civil Agencies

To help protect the public from active volcanoes, a team in the National Civil Applications Center (NCAC) at U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) headquarters in Reston, Virginia, coordinates remote sensing for volcano and disaster monitoring worldwide, drawing on satellite sensors and systems of the U.S. Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense. Volcano monitoring is one of many missions the Civil Applications Committee (CAC) oversees and makes possible.

Mission

The interagency CAC enables appropriate civil uses of overhead remote sensing technologies, and of data collected by military and intelligence capabilities, including from commercial sources.

• The USGS operates and staffs the CAC on behalf of the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI).
• The director of the USGS chairs the committee; the vice-chair is a senior official from outside DOI.

The CAC gives certain federal civil agencies access to these assets to carry out their statutory missions, in ways that do not threaten the civil rights, civil liberties and personal privacy of U.S. citizens. It hosts working groups and communities of interest, among them groups on thermal issues (wildland fires and volcanoes), environmental security and historical satellite imagery. Activities it sponsors include:

• detecting, monitoring, assessing and responding to natural disasters;
• monitoring environmental conditions;
• Earth system science research;
• land use and natural resource management;
• supporting law enforcement, regulatory and homeland security missions;
• sharing remote sensing information and products in support of national policies and objectives;
• mapping, charting and geodesy.

The committee sits where three communities meet on geospatial intelligence and remote sensing: the Intelligence Community, the Department of Defense and the federal civil community.

Membership

Oversight

The CAC tells federal users about the policies on proper civil use of the data and on protecting intelligence sources and methods. It receives, reviews and approves every civil request, sets their priorities, and is the link between federal civil agencies and the intelligence and defence communities. Through it, knowledge of how to use remote sensing capabilities reaches civil agencies. It also represents the civil community in national security forums and argues for policies and technologies that benefit civil, defence and intelligence users alike.

Public safety: Kīlauea, 2018

During the 2018 eruption in Kīlauea Volcano's lower East Rift Zone, the CAC oversaw the daily use of Intelligence Community remote sensing to help the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory make maps and keep local officials, decision makers and the public informed about how the eruption was progressing and what hazards it posed.

Kīlauea Volcano, lower East Rift Zone, map updated at 2:00 p.m. on 9 July 2018. Credit: U.S. Geological Survey.

History

• 1960. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) launched CORONA, the nation's first classified reconnaissance satellite.
• Late 1960s. The USGS opened its own secure facility and used CORONA photography to revise and update its topographic maps and for geologic and resource assessments.
• 1975. To provide oversight of Intelligence Community capabilities, President Ford directed the Secretary of the Interior to establish the Civil Applications of Classified Overhead Photography of the United States — today's CAC.
• 1993. To meet a growing need for environmental information, the CIA set up the MEDEA program, a partnership between the Intelligence Community and 70 scientists covering the major fields of environmental science. Among other work, MEDEA created the Global Fiducials Program, a systematic effort to "image, store, and eventually declassify information" about particular environmentally sensitive sites so that present and future Earth scientists could study them.
• 1998. The CAC took over the Global Fiducials Program and, with the USGS, started the Global Fiducials Library.
• 2017. The Secretary of the Interior and the Director of National Intelligence signed the committee's most recent charter.

Global Fiducials Library

With the CAC as sponsor, the Global Fiducials Library pairs the collection capabilities of the U.S. National Imagery Systems (USNIS) with the data needs of environmental scientists. Since the 1990s it has systematically imaged more than 500 environmentally sensitive "fiducial sites" around the world, to understand Earth's dynamic environmental processes, variability and change at several scales.

A fiducial site is a geographic location used as an environmental benchmark for a site of environmental significance. These sites are for long-term monitoring of natural and human-caused processes linked to the causes or effects of environmental change. The library publishes imagery time series of selected sites as unrestricted, imagery-derived products at http://gfl.usgs.gov.

East Timbalier Island, a barrier island in the Gulf of America on the west side of the Mississippi River Delta, from February 2020 to July 2021. The NCAC monitored the island's dramatic changes with imagery collected by USNIS and archived in the Global Fiducials Library. Images from Slonecker and others (2020). Credit: U.S. Geological Survey.

Newer research extends that study backward and forward in time, using declassified imagery from 1962 and 1972, Landsat imagery collected since 1972, aerial photography collected since 1953, and Global Fiducials Library imagery from 1991 to 2020.

International Charter

The CAC also supports the International Charter Space and Major Disasters, a collaboration among 129 countries that shares disaster-related imagery free of charge with civil protection authorities and the international humanitarian community (https://disasterscharter.org/). Efforts like these keep leading to new uses of defence and Intelligence Community remote sensing data and technology.

Meetings and funding

The CAC meets monthly, with experts giving briefings and status updates on USNIS operations. Its working groups and communities of interest meet as needed and are set up to handle specific CAC programmes and issues across a wide range of disaster and science analysis missions.

The CAC is funded by the USGS National Land Imaging Program and managed by the NCAC, whose facilities are hosted by the USGS in Reston, Virginia, and Lakewood, Colorado.

Sources

• Opstal, D.W., and Rogers, R.T., Civil Applications Committee: U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2022–3002 (version 1.4, January 2026). https://doi.org/10.3133/fs20223002
• The fact sheet quotes Baker and Zall (2020), "The MEDEA program — Opening a window into new Earth science data," Oceanography 33(1), and draws on a White House memorandum of 1975.
• The membership table and the words missing from the web page's description of the committee's chair are taken from the fact sheet's PDF; the committee's seal, a diagram and the International Charter's logo (used with permission) are not reproduced.
• Rewritten in hubnx's own words.