Satellite Photography Has Arrived

If you work in a comm center without any access to aerial photography, you’re missing out on lots of visual intelligence that could help you and the field forces. There is an endless series of products available from several vendors that can provide you with overhead sizes, shapes, paths and colors, all valuable pieces of information as your law enforcement, fire and EMS units converge on the scene of an incident. Satellite photography is now downright amazing, with resolutions now available down to 1/2-meter, sufficient to easily see cars, people and highway paint stripes. Imagery provider GeoEye is now offering aerial coverage from its latest satellite, which you can easily browse and select individual photos. For another viewpoint, Pictometry offers oblique aerial photos that offer the ability to measure heights, angles and other distances right from the photos, allowing you judge fire hose runs, HAZMAT stand-off distances or search areas. And while much of this coverage is available free on Web mapping sites, some of the detail is necessarily lost on-line.