Geospatial Community Responds
Tuesday, 02 February 2010 15:36
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, for example, supported the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, U.S. Southern Command and Department of Homeland Security with analysis, unclassified commercial satellite imagery and geospatial intelligence products of areas devastated by the recent earthquake. Commercial imagery providers DigitalGlobe and GeoEye have supplied commercial satellite imagery of post-earthquake Haiti to NGA.
“We’re looking at infrastructure and force protection and producing products for the command,” said Tom Mann, director, NGA Support Team to USSOUTHCOM. “We are prepared to send analysts into the region to provide support on-site.”
NGA will also be providing public access to some of its geospatial intelligence products as they become available via NGA’s crisis response portal, NGA-Earth, www.nga-earth.org. The NGA-Earth site has been updated as new geospatial intelligence products have become available. In addition to the information hosted at this location, the site provides links to other federal agency sites and is an access point to leverage other NGA geospatial expertise and products.
The Army Geospatial Center's Hydrologic and Environmental Analysis branch, meanwhile, compiled earthquake, water and geology maps, as well as a number of other data sets, and made them available via the AGC's public and internal public key infrastructure Web sites.
Industry’s contribution was also noteworthy. In addition to U.S.-based imagery providers GeoEye and DigitalGlobe, companies such as Germany-based RapidEye have made geospatial data and images of the situation available. ♦
