GeoEye Ups the Ante with its Geospatial Imagery of Earthquake-stricken Japan
On March 11, 2011, the world’s gaze turned toward Japan when a 9.0-magnitude quake and tsunami laid waste to Japan’s northeastern coast, costing thousands of lives and potentially causing a nuclear event at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power. While the world was glued to the TV and internet, watching the disaster and human interest stories unfold, two of the top geospatial satellites currently in orbit, GeoEye-1 and IKONOS, were chronicling the disaster from a very different vantage point – and potentially saving precious hours and millions of dollars in disaster recovery and re-build efforts.
Thanks to the updated satellite images, GeoEye was able to gather and disseminate to the government of Japan, other relief agencies, and even companies like Google, the hardest hit regions could be picked out, and recovery plans were able to be made more accurately than ever before. With the ability to implement the new data in mapping technologies, routes that were flooded or otherwise impassable were avoided without wasting time and resources that would have come with a trial and error approach required in the past.
What’s more, when we can move past getting survivors housed, fed and medically treated, the damage assessment process will be a time-intensive and slow process. Yet using the geospatial technologies we have available today, we can instantaneously compare before and after pictures of affected areas, making the assessment more accurate and efficient.
This recent disaster has thrown new light on how pragmatic geospatial information and its integration into the next generation of GIS technology is to all parties involved in returning Japan, or any disaster-struck area to a state of normalcy as soon as humanly possible.
Take a look at new GeoEye imagery from Japan directly overlaid over pre-earthquake data that highlights the extent of earthquake damage.
http://www.geoeye.com/CorpSite/promotions/Japan_Image_Slider.html
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