However, today I noticed a first. Some of the imagery that exists in Google Earth is there because of me... (you'll see what I mean). Last summer, the Angora Fire burned immediately south of Lake Tahoe and was in the news quite a bit for a few weeks. A lot of homes burned down, but luckily no lives were lost. I mapped the burn severity of this fire for the US Forest Service BAER team and as part of that effort, I acquired a Quickbird image. Quickbird images provide a lot of great information due to their spatial resolution. After getting the image, I processed it and sent it on to my cooperators on the incident.
Google and DigitalGlobe (the folks who own the Quickbird sensor) have an agreement that allows Google to open DG's archive and pull whatever images they want so they can add them to Google Earth. It was fun to see an image I ordered and initiated in Google Earth for the entire world to see. Wohoo!
To see what I'm talking about: open Google Earth and do a search for "Fallen Leaf Lake". Pan immediately to the east and you'll see a distinct burned / unburned delineation. I've captured some screen shots to show what we can see from this image.
In image #1, you can easily see the burned area (lightest in color) and the red fire retardant drops.
This was intriguing to me because you could easily see which homes burned down and which ones were spared.
4 comments:
Those fire retardant lines are pretty cool. Is the stuff really that red? The coolest thing about the new Google Earth is that they now have the acquisition date at the bottom in the status bar. It's between elev. and Eye alt. Ever since Google Earth came to be I've wanted to know, When was this taken?
I didn't even realize there was a new version of the software until you mentioned that. Yeah, I agree and I get that question from tons of people (like I know the answer...). It's good to see them add the acquisition date.
The retardant is usually red, but I think it's variable vendor-to-vendor.
I agree, it is pretty cool to see those pictures that you have made on such a public forum. Keep it up. Now if you could just do them in color!
Dad Clark
Those actually are in color...natural color. That's what you'd see if you were flying over it in a helicopter.
That's one of the great things about remote sensing: we use typically use other portions of the electromagnetic spectrum that our eyes don't see to garner more information about the earth.
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