NGS Responds to Hurricane Sandy

[Daughter of the Nine Moons]

NOAA's National Geodetic Survey (NGS) has been coordinating with federal, state, and local officials and conducting remote sensing efforts in response to Hurricane Sandy. Requests came in from the U.S. Coast Guard District in New York for imagery collection of waterways supporting the ports of New York and New Jersey to verify the location of navigational aids and storm debris. NGS mission flights began on Wednesday, October 31, just hours after Hurricane Sandy made landfall, with NGS crews aboard NOAA's King Air and NOAA's Twin Otter aircraft collecting aerial imagery to assess damage caused by the storm. These high-resolution photos provide emergency and coastal managers with the information they need to develop recovery strategies. NGS Emergency Response imagery is spatially referenced, which allows it to be ingested into Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software. This attribute is what makes the NGS product unique from most other post storm imagery providers and is of great value to first responders, decision makers, and the public. The images facilitate search-and-rescue efforts, identify hazards to navigation and HAZMAT spills, locate errant vessels, and provide documentation necessary for damage assessment through the comparison of before-and-after imagery.

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[CommunitarianKevin]

This is the kind of stuff we need to spend money on. Stuff that actually helps our people here...

[Ashotep]

This is a step in the right direction, sometimes its hard to remember what it looked like before the destruction.