Hurricane Katrina Archives
September 08, 2005
Much Improved Method for Viewing Katrina Damage Imagery
Google has greatly improved the interface to access the NOAA imagery of Katrina damage.. They have used a method they experimented with a few days ago for Digital Globe photos to show dynamic tiles of images based on your current view. This means it will only pull in a big high resolution image as you zoom in and only the portion you can see. So, it cuts down on the amount of bandwidth and download time while giving you a more smooth way to view the imagery.
You can download the new link here 
, or go to read Google's post about it here. When you are using this new network link, make sure you pause after you change a view for a few seconds. It waits for you to pause before it loads the new images according to your new view to cut down on bandwidth.
Posted by FrankTaylor at 08:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 06, 2005
Latest FEMA Katrina Damage Assessment Overlay
Google was given permission to provide overlays from a Monday night assessment of damage done by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). This overlay shows the areas FEMA has assessed so far for flooded areas, light damage to catastrophic damage in a graphical fashion. You can download the overlays here or read the Google Earth team's post here.
NOTE: Google says you may need a more recent graphics card or at least more recent graphics drivers for this to work properly.
Posted by FrankTaylor at 10:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 05, 2005
News Coverage on Google Earth and Hurricane Help
The New York Times has written an article (you can see it at CNET here or at the New York Times) which talks about the way the Google Earth forums has responded with these images and helped hurricane victims and potential victims check on the damaged areas in Google Earth. Here's another story by Forbes. And here's a story by the BBC on the topic.
A woman named Kathryn Cramer has dedicated her time during the past week to helping hurricane victims with information using Google Earth and her blog. She's is mentioned in the above stories. She has posted links to several stories around the world she's heard about on these topics here.
Posted by FrankTaylor at 08:16 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Up To Date Katrina Damage Imagery
The Google Earth team has worked hard this weekend and has updated their earlier release of imagery. The first part includes even more NOAA imagery of the damaged areas. Click here to download the new network link enabled overview of the entire collection. This network link will automatically update to the latest imagery. You will see dots where the images are located and can individually load each image. As before, these are large images and you may not want to turn too many on at the same time due to computer memory.
Google has also developed a very cool dynamic overlay of imagery from Digital Globe of the New Orleans area. This is a network link which is based on your current view which will load tiles of images. Download this link here .
Posted by FrankTaylor at 07:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 02, 2005
[UPDATE] Google Releasing Katrina Imagery
Google has started releasing image overlays of damage from Katrina for Google Earth. They made the announcement here and on the Google Earth home page. You can really see the before and after differences with these images (you can turn the images on and off to do comparisons or slide the transparency slider on and off).
[EDIT September 3: Google has made available a huge amount of imagery of the damaged areas tapping into all images from NOAA and all images done by readers of their forums. You can read about it in their post here. Or, you can download the NOAA imagery links now. This will show the location of all the images they have, you can click on a red dot and then select to download the image. NOTE: these are 4Kx4K images and will take up a lot of memory. Don't turn on too many at once or your machine will get overloaded.]
The GE developer team mentioned they realize some of the user-supplied images are just as good or better right now. But, these images are placed on hefty servers with mega bandwidth, so they should be more reliable than some of the other sources.
It seems to me Google could make these images available through the Layers fairly easily. I don't think it would be a good idea to change the primary database with these images as hopefully the signs of destruction will go away over the coming months. Although, I'm sure the buildings and economies will take years to rebuild.
Posted by FrankTaylor at 08:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
More entries for this category:
- New Katrina Damage Photos in Google Earth - September 01, 2005
- Hurricane Katrina Video and Google Earth - August 31, 2005