The NOAA's first post-Rita photos are up:
NOAA today posted online more than 1,100 aerial images of the U.S. Gulf Coast areas in the path of Hurricane Rita. The regions photographed on Sunday covered the coastal regions of Louisiana and Texas. The aerial photography missions were conducted by the NOAA Remote Sensing Division the day after the center of Rita made landfall at approximately 3:30 a.m. EDT on the extreme southwest coast of Louisiana between Sabine Pass, Texas, and Johnson's Bayou in Louisiana.
And Carnegie Mellon has processed them as a GoogleEarth Overlay. (For more info on how to use it, see Brent's Computer Tutorials.)
Note that the photos cover only the coastal areas of the area hardest hit.
Now, can GoogleMaps please acquire some better satellite photos of the rural coastal areas as a basis of comparison? Surely, Digital Globe has some on hand? And something more recent than the late 90s? VirtualEarth seems to have some USGS black and white images of the coastal areas that are a bit better.
(Thanks, Anne Wright of the NASA Ames Research Center.)
PS: Just so you know, so far, this is a harder problem than doing house-by-house phtographic damage assessment on NOLA. If you are trying to do this and getting frustrated, ask for help and we'll see what we can do. But this is not a solved problem yet.
UPDATE:
- Brent has just finihed his how-to guide on using GoogleEarth to assess damage from Rita.
- Anne Wright of the Global Connection Project NASA Ames Research Center says:
Updated NOAA Rita overlays for Google Earth are now available from http://jaga.gc.cs.cmu.edu/noaa/. Images courtesy of NOAA.
This revision includes approx 2,100 NOAA images from 9/25 - 9/26, and includes links to full resolution 4k x 4k overlays, as well as subsampled overlays which may load more quickly. The new data covers more inland areas around Port Arthur and Orange.
UPDATE 9/30: VirtualEarth now has a Rita site up.
