Primer on the Industry
Content Bookmarks:
Providing Relief in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
Southeast Asian Tsunami: Rebuilding a Community
Streamlining Marathon Oil's Large-Scale Facility Development
Realistic Views for Simulator Training
Bringing Online Maps to Life
Mapping the Vastness of Alaska
Providing Relief in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
The Challenge: When Hurricane Katrina struck the U.S. Gulf Coast states on Aug. 29, 2005 hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and entire cities were underwater for weeks. The cities of New Orleans, Louisiana and Biloxi, Mississippi were hard hit – the hurricane destroyed neighborhoods, washed out thoroughfares and abolished entire infrastructures. Emergency relief organizations needed a way to map the area to determine the extent of damage as well as dispatch relief workers to affected areas.
The Solution: DigitalGlobe’s QuickBird satellite collected imagery of New Orleans on Aug. 31, just two days after Hurricane Katrina struck, and again on Sept. 3, nearly one week later. The imagery showed flooding extent, levee break locations, and damage to structures such as bridges and buildings. It also pinpointed landmarks such as the Louisiana Superdome. Imagery was also collected over Biloxi and the surrounding region. Imagery collected over the same regions in March 2004 created critical capabilities for comparing the landscape and infrastructure of the Gulf Coast region before and after the disaster occurred.
DigitalGlobe Imagery in Action: San Diego State University partnered with the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology to aid relief efforts in impacted regions, and ImageCat, a technology company that specializes in risk assessment and management solutions, teamed with Risk Management Solutions to map wind, storm surge and flooding damage resulting from the hurricane. Utilizing a cross-section of tools such as QuickBird satellite imagery, GIS, 3D visualization systems and hand-held software technologies, these separately deployed teams were able to quickly assess damage, support clean-up efforts, estimate impacts on public health, and support response and reconstruction efforts by front-line responders and command-center groups such as the National Red Cross.
In the Customer’s Words: “The QuickBird imagery became a powerful asset for aiding in critical relief efforts, and the 3D image displays and rapid flythroughs we created with the imagery provided visualization tools to support all of our collaborative efforts with partner agencies.” – SDSU’s Eric Frost, director of the Viz Center
“QuickBird enabled us to map in detail the full extent of flooding in New Orleans, view the hurricane’s effects using our VIEWS visualization tool, and provide storm surge damage maps for the Mississippi coast. This information was invaluable for calibrating initial damage and loss estimates for the Gulf Coast and New Orleans regions.” – Dr. Beverley Adams, remote sensing group leader for ImageCat
Southeast Asian Tsunami: Rebuilding a Community
The Challenge: The Dec. 26, 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami wiped out entire communities, shattering communications lines, obliterating roads and destroying a way of life. An estimated 128,000 people were killed. For relief organizations that fled to the site from around the world, it would be difficult to navigate the area and locate victims in need – as well as determine what previous infrastructure still remained versus what aspects of the village had been completely destroyed by the tsunami.
The Solution: After the tsunami, San Diego State University’s Visualization Center (the Viz Center) quickly assembled a relief team to assess damage and establish medical facilities and medical reachback in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. The team worked to gather information about the cultural and societal impacts of the tsunami while also anticipating the area’s needs in terms of roads, utility lines and other physical infrastructure. This would involve acquiring accurate before-and-after satellite image-based maps of the damaged region to discern the state of the infrastructure and form a plan for addressing it. For this, the Viz Center team turned to DigitalGlobe.
DigitalGlobe Imagery in Action: On Dec. 28, two days after the tsunami struck Banda Aceh, DigitalGlobe released imagery of the area to relief organizations, the global media and the general public. The images illustrated in detail a markedly changed shoreline and flood damage more than three kilometers inland – large piles of debris, ruined villages and washed out vegetation, roads, bridges and rail lines. DigitalGlobe also provided images collected in June 2003 for making critical comparisons of the geography before and after the storm. The imagery was available to Viz Center relief workers as hand-carried poster-size prints, and as digital data via a secure server hosted at the San Diego Supercomputer Center
In the Customer’s Words: “Right after the tsunami, communications in Indonesia were shattered, and people around the world knew very little about what happened. The immediate availability of DigitalGlobe’s dramatic imagery helped the world truly understand the damage and the death tolls. The images motivated people to take immediate action and send relief to Southeast Asia.” – John Graham, a senior research scientist at the Viz Center
Streamlining Marathon Oil's Large-Scale Facility Development
The Challenge: In 2002 Marathon Oil Company purchased its interest in the Alba field offshore Equatorial Guinea. Estimated to be Equatorial Guinea's largest gas field, Alba field has a projected remaining gross risked recoverable resource of 4.4 trillion cubic feet of gas. Marathon and its government and private partners have embarked upon a series of expansion projects that will enable significant gas resources there to be commercialized. Marathon needed to monitor construction and create a method for communicating the progress to its sub-contractors. Due to the field’s remoteness and the difficulty in accessing it, it was cost- and resource-prohibitive to collect imagery detailed enough to create visual, informative maps of the area.
The Solution: To help maximize its investment, Marathon tapped into remote sensing technologies. The company has continuously acquired high-resolution QuickBird satellite imagery over the plant since 2002 in order to monitor construction and improve communications about its progress.
DigitalGlobe Imagery in Action: The 60-centimeter resolution QuickBird images are used by Marathon Oil for acquiring detail perspectives of the Alba field. These satellite image-based facility maps have been instrumental for reconciling land ownership boundaries, communicating with sub-contractors, integrating construction drawings into a local coordinate system, construction and contingency planning, new employee orientations and public health improvement efforts.
In the Customer’s Words: “The Gulf of Guinea is extremely remote and hard to access. There are no available air photos and the cost and time that would be required to mobilize an aircraft are prohibitive. The easy access to high-resolution satellite imagery and software is the determining factor in making this type of project possible.” – Roger Holeywell, advanced senior geologist for Marathon Oil
Realistic Views for Simulator Training
The Challenge: The multi-billion dollar mining industry faces challenges related to production and safety on a daily basis. While mining equipment owners strive to maximize their investments in sophisticated machinery and personnel, they must also take a critical look at ways to maintain personal safety. Immersive Technologies, Advanced computer-based simulator training packages for the mining industry, depends on technologies that immerse equipment operator trainees in a “real world” scenario without sacrificing expensive equipment or putting trainees in danger.
The Solution: Through Australia’s Sinclair Knight Merz, Immersive Technologies discovered the use of QuickBird high-resolution satellite imagery for enhancing simulator training packages. The 60-centimeter resolution of the imagery backdrops provide realistic, close-up views that mining equipment trainees find helpful for navigating a mining area and understanding the local topography. Coming to life in 3D perspective, the images clearly show access roads, geological structures such as faults and fractures, vegetation, drainage systems, water and pollution sources, soil erosion and a host of other critical features.
DigitalGlobe Imagery in Action: Integrated into Immersive Technologies’ products, QuickBird imagery has consistently proven to reduce project duration, mitigate project risks and improve the quality and consistency of products – resulting in an enhanced and safer training environment for Immersive Technologies’ clients. And, since the QuickBird satellite is not restricted by the remoteness of any location or by changes in weather patterns, it is a reliable method for collecting data over inaccessible mining sites in many corners of the world. The satellite imagery is yielding a 9 to 10 percent reduction in project development time for Immersive Technologies.
In the Customer’s Words: “Aerial photography was just an impossible and expensive option. There was no assurance of the quality or relevance of the data, and this created large variations in project costs. The DigitalGlobe satellite imagery provides a consistently excellent, standardized source of data.” – Greg Karadjian, development manager for Immersive Technologies’ Visual Database Department
The Challenge: Maps and spatial information are critical for city planners who need to make decisions about where to install a utility line, plan a new neighborhood, design a highway interchange or create a new public garden. But every planner knows that spatial information must always be current and accessible in order to be helpful. Hardcopy maps become outdated quickly – sometimes within days of bring printed – and are expensive and time-consuming to reproduce. Australia’s capital city of Canberra needed a convenient, easily accessible method of displaying and sharing accurate maps with its city planners so they could stay on top of geographic changes.
The Solution: Since the Internet has become the de facto standard for posting publicly available information, displaying maps and spatial data there was a natural choice for Canberra’s Department of Urban Services. To display visual information such as roads, lakes and rivers, airports, forested areas, railways and a host of other ground features, the department turned to DigitalGlobe satellite imagery. The imagery was integrated into the group’s Web mapping tools, collectively referred to as Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Locate.
DigitalGlobe Imagery in Action: Users of the ACT Locate system now experience a unique dimension in online geographic information. With a quick click of a mouse, a user simply selects an area of interest by either doing a “search and locate” by entering street address, land block details or place/feature name, or using the “create a map” feature to select and zoom into an area – all with the detailed backdrop of high-resolution satellite imagery. All ACT Government organizations may access and use the imagery-based tool for visualization and for detailed analysis in numerous applications related to land and resource management. The general public may also access the maps at any time, creating opportunities for recreational mapping, real estate planning or virtual sight-seeing.
In the Customer’s Words: “The imagery will provide a valuable historical resource as the ACT physical environment changes with time. And, the use of digital data is crucial, because it means we can update the databases very rapidly and ensure users of the system that the information they are viewing is accurate.” – Robert Twin, manager of the Geographic Information Management Unit in Canberra
Mapping the Vastness of Alaska
The Challenge: The State of Alaska’s vastness and sparse population, combined with its remote location, severely limit the state’s ability to use traditional methods to intensively and efficiently map basic features, such as roads, highways and urban areas. In addition, threat from wildfire is an annual danger faced by Alaska's towns and villages. Without tools to accurately map important ground features, emergency personnel lack the information needed to quickly locate and access areas in danger, leaving the state’s communities and natural resources at greater risk for disasters such as floods, fires and river bank erosion.
The Solution: The State of Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) turned to high-resolution QuickBird satellite imagery to map key areas of the state and share the maps electronically with state agencies that need access to updated geographic information. Now, the DNR can better support emergency response services, economic development and community outreach efforts. In the future, the DNR intends to map all urban areas in Alaska and put the satellite image maps on the Web for each community to view and use.
DigitalGlobe Imagery in Action: QuickBird imagery was used by the DNR Division of Forestry to help firefighters fight wildfires that began blazing through forested areas south of Fairbanks in May 2003. Showing trails and roads, building structures and fire-prone vegetation, the images were used to determine the locations of endangered structures, evacuation routes, and areas where fire fighter personnel needed to be dispatched. The QuickBird images replaced the outdated, inefficient paper maps of remote areas, and street atlas maps in the urban interface that firefighters had previously used to attack fires. The QuickBird images proved to be a critical resource for quick responses by the Division of Forestry and cooperating fire departments.
In the Customer’s Words: “The dilemma that Alaska faces is that we have no good data sources, compared to the lower 48 states in the United States, which historically have good maps and elevation models. QuickBird data serves as an excellent, functional mapping base.” In the context of fire prevention and mitigation, he adds, “Because of its high-resolution and accuracy, QuickBird is perhaps the only practical solution to providing resources for emergency service organizations… Providing our firefighters with QuickBird imagery is a life and safety issue.” – Marc Lee, Fairbanks area forester
