NOAA has posted online more than 350 aerial images of the U.S. Gulf Coast areas that were decimated by Hurricane Katrina early this week. NOAA will be flying more missions in the days ahead that will yield hundreds of additional aerial digital images. The regions photographed range from Bay St. Louis to Pascagoula, Mississippi. The southeast coastal areas of Louisiana are being photographed on Wednesday. The aerial photograph missions were conducted by the NOAA Remote Sensing Division the day after Katrina made landfall.
NOAA used an Emerge/Applanix Digital Sensor System, or DSS, to acquire the images from an altitude of 7,500 feet. The equipment was mounted on NOAA’s Cessna Citation aircraft, which is a versatile twin-engine jet aircraft modified for acquiring coastal remote sensing imagery. The aircraft can support a wide variety of remote sensing configurations, including large format aerial photography, as well as data collection for digital cameras, hyperspectral, multispectral and LIDAR systems.
