Well, we're officially back on. About 15 fires are burning and have burned around 400,000 acres, consumed many homes, and taken the lives of a few people. We are beginning to ramp up our efforts to secure imagery of these fires.
I got a call from the USGS yesterday asking if I would send them an email requesting assistance from The International Disaster Charter on behalf of the USFS. I decided to pass that on to my boss, but we did get that going. This basically means that all these vendors -- commercial or governmental -- will be providing imagery for free of all these fires. We get to decide which sensors to use and where to point them. This is much different than 2003, when we were limited to a few real options and a big pain in the butt.
When Southern California lights up, everyone wants to be involved. Sensors we couldn't task (like ALI aboard NASA's EO-1) during the rest of the fire season are suddenly interested in helping. Everybody wants to be in the news.
I also start getting calls from random people asking for information. Yesterday, I got a call from a guy representing Countrywide Financial Corp., a large mortgage company. They wanted info. on the fire activity to begin thinking about how to deal with all the claims that will be coming in soon.
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2 comments:
Just out of curiosity, what sensors are you using? Commercial and Government.
Both, but nothing classified that we know of yet. I have order specs in my inbox from SPOT, IRSO, JAXA, DMCii, CONAE, and Landsat.
We haven't made any plans for the hi-res stuff yet and are currently focusing on 10 - 50m res. stuff, hopefully with SWIR bands, but at least with NIR bands.
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