We’ve partnered with USA Today to visualize the impact of Monday’s tornado in Oklahoma. The Civil Air Patrol conducted flyovers, capturing aerial images immediately after the storm. The images captured were different from traditional vertical aerial photography and weren’t fully georeferenced, meaning creating a mosaic basemap wasn’t feasible.
Instead, we took a different approach to navigating the rapid response imagery – the images, previously only available piecemeal on the USGS HDDS website, are displayed on the map as markers. The markers track the Civil Air Patrol flightpath, and specific markers represent the location of the camera as it captured the image, rather than the location of the image itself.
