I spent yesterday at the NSGIC Annual Meeting in Keystone, Colo., and learned about visualization and imagery sources for disaster response from Brenda Jones, disaster response coordinator at the U.S. Geological Survey’s EROS Data Center in Sioux Falls, SD. Brenda and her colleague Ron Risty are on call 24 hours a day to facilitate geospatial data for emergency response.
The USGS acts as the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s executive agent for aerial and satellite imagery. They procure aerial and satellite imagery in preparation or in response to disaster, and are currently pre-positioning planes for the incoming Hurricane Ike. They also work to coordinate data sharing between state, federal and local agencies, holding daily imagery teleconferences during disaster response situations in order to meet the needs of first responders on the ground.
The International Charter provides free imagery to those affected by disasters, with a large international group of charter members that are made up of commercial and government-owned imagery providers. The U.S. Air Force also has a program called Eagle Vision that provides satellite imagery for disaster response. In addition, the USGS can coordinate the Environmental Protection Agency’s airborne spectral sensor, the Civil Air Patrol’s assets, sensors from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, planes from the National Guard Bureau, LIDAR and hyperspectral imagery from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and commercial imagery from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
Most recently, within the last few weeks, a number of previously classified military imagery sources have been made available for disaster response. The U.S. AirForce U2 program provides film-based panoramic imagery for broad areas at 10 in. resolution with a huge footprint, imaging an area larger than California within days. The U.S. Air Force RC26 platform provides multi-sensor imagery. And there’s the Air National Guard Scathe View that features forward-looking infrared radar (FLIR).
The unmanned aerial vehicles Global Hawk from the Air Force and NASA’s Ikhana have proved particularly effective for wildfire fighting, due to their ability to linger over a site. In fact, both these UAVs have been credited with saving lives in the recent California wildfires.
I was impressed to learn of the considerable imagery resources that are available to fight disasters in the United States, and of the hands-on coordination efforts that are provided by the USGS to make sure that the right data gets into the hands of responders.
