Posted on 04/27/2003 1:02:32 PM PDT by mwyounce
Embedded in the office behind his Columbus Drive home, Chuck Watson reports to the world nearly in real-time about Iraq.
His reporting tool of choice? Satellite imagery.
The unassuming mapping and satellite expert has scooped traditional news outlets more than once during the war. Watson posted on his Web site enhanced satellite images that showed:
* Oil fires in Kirkuk;
* Fires around Baghdad;
* Fighting in Basra.
They were posted before any worldwide media reported the events.
The images amazed Mark Johnson, a statistics professor at the University of Central Florida, who works on modeling projects with Watson. "He was detecting things I didn't hear about for a while," he said.
Watson himself keeps tabs on who's reporting what. With four remote controls on his desk, he casually flips through Palestinian state television, a Qatar station, a NASA internal feed and EuroNews, a pan European channel simulcast in seven languages.
Before the war, Watson contacted media such as CNN, Fox, ABC, CBS and the Associated Press offering his services.
"I never got an answer back," he said.
But then at 8 a.m. March 20, he posted an image indicating an oil fire in Basra.
"U.S. networks didn't report rumors of the fires until 11 a.m.," Watson said. "At the Pentagon briefing at 11 a.m., they said they had no definitive data."
Pretty quickly his site started to get thousands of hits per minute.
After he established a track record of pointing out fires that were later verified by field reporters, Watson got interest from more than 100 news agencies, including British, Dutch, German and Spanish television networks.
Watson uses publicly available satellite images. But his skill in enhancing them makes all the difference. He uses university developed software, plus some programs he's created himself, to paint the fuzzy images so events such as oil fires are identifiable.
And Watson can identify them. Much like an obstetrician pointing out a fetus' arm on a sonogram, it's not all that obvious to the untrained eye. His Web site allows viewers to click on labelled images.
A 12-foot satellite dish in his back yard captures images beamed back to Earth every six hours from Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellites. A smaller dish gives him NASA's in-house TV programming.
Twelve computer systems, with total power equal to 45 personal computers, store and analyze Watson's data. One is a homemade Beowulf class supercomputer with 32 processors stored in a $30 steel file cabinet from Wal-Mart.
From the satellite feeds he stores enough data to fill a CD-ROM every five minutes.
Watson, 41, grew up in Savannah and graduated from Benedictine Military Academy. His bachelor's degree in electrical engineering is from the University of Maryland. Although he's published more than 50 papers on geophysics, numerical modeling and remote sensing, he doesn't have a graduate degree.
His colleague Johnson, himself a Ph.D., doesn't care about that.
"He's pretty unpretentious so people underestimate him," he said "He can crank out a model so quick it's unbelievable."
Watson's work doesn't surprise his former physics teacher at Benedictine, the Rev. Wilfred Dumm, who said he remembered Watson as a cerebral student with a good imagination.
"He just doesn't believe he can't go one step further," Dumm said.
The Iraq pictures aren't a money-making venture, Watson said. He gives permission to use the images to anyone who asks, as long as they give him credit.
He follows the events in part because he's personally interested in the Mideast, having run secure satellite communications in Baghdad and Beirut for then-Special Mideast Envoy Donald Rumsfeld in 1983 and 1984. He was a staff sergeant in the Air Force then.
More importantly, though, the Iraq images are a bit of public relations mixed with a big research opportunity.
Much of Watson's work focuses on weather. He models patterns of flooding in a hurricane. The war in Iraq gives him a unique opportunity.
"War is a controlled disaster," Watson said. "We can monitor it and learn something we can use for natural disasters."
The war was the first major conflict since the newer generation of satellites was launched.
With the war turning into peacekeeping, Watson continues to monitor Iraq. On Monday, he identified another unreported oil fire - near the confluence of the Tigris and Great Zab rivers.
But he's scaling back in Iraq and starting to routinely download images from North Korea.
"You know," he said, "you never know."
Media interest in Watson's satellite imagery
From Slate.com (http://slate.msn.com/id/2080407/):
"... this website is providing up-to-the-minute weather satellite photos of Iraq - with explanations. An 8 a.m. post on March 20 contains a picture taken of Basra oil fields at 5 a.m., along with comments that it looked like there was an oil well fire - three hours before news outlets reported anything about this."
From the Detroit Free Press' technology columnist, Mike Wendland (http://www.freep.com/money/tech/sites18_20030318.htm):
"Here are some sites I've found that are particularly useful:
Iraq from Space (www.methaz.com/blogpics/iraq.html): These are daily satellite images of Iraq, Kuwait and the region, taken from weather satellites. Chuck Watson, the satellite and mapping expert who runs the site, says dust storms can be seen, as would major oil well fires, extensive flooding and any other large-scale calamity."
The BBC linked to Watson's site when it ran a story "Satellites look down on Baghdad."
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2895837.stm)
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