Alaska Satellite Imagery Newsletter - June
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Greetings ,
Wow, put away the antidepressants. Clear summer days are here, the snow long gone and collection season is here! All humor aside, it has been somewhat of a relief that we have had a longer gradual late spring. Last fall floods left a recipe for great disaster in many parts of our state. Unfortunately, Galena, Alaska has suffered a great deal of flooding due to ice jams in the river. We have been tracking these developments please refer to the article below.
Please take the time to check out our new ORI-Fusion product below. This takes 5 meter RapidEye imagery and readily available ortho-rectified radar images (ORI's)
to generate imagery of 1.25 to 2.5 meter resolution at an affordable price.
If you have project needs please give us a call, now is the time! We will keep you up to date with current developments as the season progresses. In the mean time enjoy all that Alaska has to offer for work and play, make sure someone knows where you are headed, that doesn't mean facebook'ing the coordinates of your 200lb halibut or you'll attract unwanted company.
Be safe!
-Steve Colligan, President
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Spotlight: Flooding in Galena, Rapideye captures Images in time.
(Click on a thumbnail image to to display in higher resolution).
The rivers in the interior of Alaska break-up every spring with ice jams, resulting in floods and various villages seeing flooding damage. This year's most publicized village flood happened in the village of Galena, a former Air Force Base. While the airport and most of the former military base is well protected with a high dyke/levee, the village itself lacks such fortification. The word fortification is proper as the levees are not just protecting against rising water levels as is normal, but they are protecting against the huge floating pieces of river ice that tend to be ramrodded through many villages by the heavy spring flooding curr ent of the river.
Previous years have shown how the ice can completely raze half a village in a single flooding event. As can be seen in the June 1st RapidEye image all of Galena is located in a low area that consists of old river channels within a floodplain. The extent of the flooding is readily apparent when comparing the June 1st image with an archive shot from the 8th of August 2012, where almost all old river channels are fairly dry muskeg. With RapidEye we have all of Alaska in archive as cloud free summer data, and we even have multiple years of coverage. RapidEye is the only Satellite System that can provide that service, today.
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Spotlight: New RapidEye-ORI Fusion Product
(Click on a thumbnail image to to display in higher resolution).
The SDMI Ifsar DEM collection is covering an increasing percentage of Alaska. A byproduct of the elevation data collection are ortho-rectified radar images (ORI's), which have a spatial resolution of between 0.625 meters and 2.5 meters depending on the area, providing a detailed radar sensor's view with good spatial accuracy. The spatial detail of the ORI can be fused with RapidEye imagery to create color imagery with 1.25 to 2.5 meters spatial resolution. RapidEye and E-Terra have been working on developing techniques that do a good job at preserving the natural color of the RapidEye image while adding the spatial detail from the ORI. The result can be a cost-effective alternative if you need imagery with better resolution than RapidEye's 5 meter. Due to RapidEye's almost completely cloud free coverage of Alaska, this product's availability is only limited by the current Ifsar coverage.
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