Airborne High Resolution Imagery to Aid San Diego Fire Control

This blog is focused on the wide range of solutions to real-life problems that can be addressed with Crossbow's wireless sensor network products. This particular posting will focus on the other side of our business - our inertial systems.

This past weekend I headed down to Southern California to visit some family and friends and was sad to see the cloudy cover of smoke and haze still left from the horrible fires that destroyed hundreds of Southern California homes and forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee. Final figures being reported say that 1500 homes were destroyed and over 500,000 acres of land burned from Santa Barbara County to the US-Mexico border. Governor Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency as over 6000 firemen worked to fight the blazes. The major contributing factors to the extreme fire conditions were the drought in Southern California, hot weather, and unusually strong Santa Ana winds with gusts reaching 85 mph (140 km/h). Besides the reduced air quality visible this past weekend, we were relieved to find our family and friends out of harms way. However, I was interested to hear how one of Crossbow's customers, NEOS, Ltd. did their part to contribute to the containment and recovery of the areas consumed by the fires.

San Diego County was the location of the two biggest fires by area burned. The fires forced the largest evacuation in the region's history. NEOS, Ltd. had been contracted by Homeland Security, Google Earth and Border Patrol to begin high resolution aerial surveillance of the fire impact zones in San Diego County. Specifically NEOS, Ltd provided 6' to 1' resolution RGB imagery with DGPS and IMU data that was posted daily on Google Earth. The NEOS aircraft was chosen because of its low altitude forensic capability, short data turn-around and high data quality. It filled in details for the daily Predator and MODIS satellite coverage received at the command center located at San Diego State University.

NEOS - Near Earth Observation Systems used Crossbow's NAV440 GPS-Aided MEMS inertial system on their GT-500 to overfly the San Diego fire zones and provide airborne imagery. The NAV440 was used to improve the accuracy and quality of the images that were used to help in the effort to identify and contain the fires and set up fire defense lines. The NAV440 was able to report the exact position of the aircraft and aiming orientation of the camera. The NEOS system is designed to provide dynamic situational intelligence. The image shows the flight track of the system aircraft flown by NEOS as logged on Google Earth. The second photo shows a damage example and the level of detail obtained from a 10 mega pixel imaging system that can collect over 3,000 images per hour under high clouds, smoke and haze.

Crossbow's NAV440 is a combined GPS Navigation and GPS-Aided Attitude and Heading Reference system (AHRS) that utilizes both MEMS-based inertial sensors and GPS technology. In conjunction with the survey and terrain mapping services and remote sensing that NEOS, Ltd. provides with their GT500 aircraft, the geographic information extraction this solution provides can aid in efforts ranging from disaster recovery, intrusion identification, national security, etc. by providing timely and accurate information for tactical and strategic response to these scenarios. As a California resident, I was proud to see the ways Crossbow technology can be used to aid in recovery. Our prayers for peace, consolation and safety go out to our neighbors affected by these fires.