Posted on 09/04/2005 10:31:26 PM PDT by neverdem
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 4 - On Friday afternoon, Leonard Sprague, a general contractor in Gainesville, Fla., saw the electronic plea.
"I hope someone can help," someone using the name ZuluOne wrote to an online bulletin board. "I am trying to get a current overlay for the area around 2203 Curcor Court in Gulfport, Miss."
Mr. Sprague knew that "current overlay" meant a bird's-eye view. And an altruistic impulse combined with an urge to play with a new technology propelled him into action. Using his PC, he superimposed a freshly available posthurricane aerial photograph over a prehurricane image of the same neighborhood. After 15 minutes, he had an answer.
"Actually, it looks like your house looks pretty good," Mr. Sprague told ZuluOne by e-mail. "Unfortunately, it doesn't look so good for some of your neighbors. Best of luck to you and your family."
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of displaced residents and their relatives - along with people like Mr. Sprague - have turned to the Internet for information about a home feared damaged or destroyed. Many are using Google Earth, a program available at the Google Web site that lets users zoom in on any address for an aerial view drawn from a database of satellite photos.
By the end of last week, a grass-roots effort had identified scores of posthurricane images, determined the geographical coordinates and visual landmarks to enable their integration into the Google Earth program, and posted them to a Google Earth bulletin board - the place ZuluOne turned for help.
Most of the images originated with the Remote Sensing Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has been posting them to its Web site (noaa.gov) since Wednesday.
Taking inspiration from the online volunteers, Google, NASA and Carnegie Mellon University had by...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Google
Google
Above, an aerial image taken before the hurricane shows part of U.S. 90 in the coastal city of Pass Christian, Miss., just east of St. Louis Bay. Below, the same location after Hurricane Katrina.
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FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list. Anyone can post any unrelated link as they see fit.
I was just sitting here playing with this stuff! Here's what I was looking at: http://www.googleearthhacks.com/dlcat72/Hurricane-Katrina-and-Flooding.htm
If Google Earth were a man, I'd marry him!
Dog Gone, you'll be interested in this thread.
It needs more high resolution coverage of the planet, but it's already an awesome tool. The dynamic overlays you can install on it for live radar, traffic conditions, and other real time events are just amazing.
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