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Troops are massing on a hostile border. A category five hurricane approaches the Florida coast. An earthquake threatens residents of a populous city. How do military and relief organizations respond?

Military personnel in the role of knowledge-management officers are tasked with transforming intelligence and gathered information into situational awareness to safeguard troops and ground staff. Additionally, humanitarian and aid workers must discern safe harbor locations, assess environmental impact and communicate ground data across multiple organizations. In circumstances that require instant decision making, rapid access to decisive location information can save lives.

The use of sophisticated satellite imagery has become a critical tool in creating an improved decision environment, arming first responders with the best visual intelligence and geospatial information available and, in many cases, providing the only reliable view of devastated areas, battlefields and surrounding terrains.

Keeping the World Current
Of all the geospatial content available, a visual perspective based on satellite-imaged ground truth is one of the most valuable communication assets. It breaks through language and educational barriers, requires little technical knowledge for interpretation and provides detailed location information as well as a wide-range geographic context for military deployments.

For military operations, access to the most current imagery viewed alongside historical benchmarks has a discernable impact on everyday field decisions, where, historically, many digital maps have been nonexistent or out of date. On a changing battlefield, it is imperative to understand the whereabouts of supply routes, bridges and safe-harbor locations, such as schools, churches and hospitals. But taking the necessary time to confirm the true ground status can delay field decisions or require more dangerous and costly verification of the location of potential weapon caches or enemy forces.

For relief organizations, including local police and fire departments, access to detailed imagery during the days surrounding an event is critical for evacuation, relief supplies and rescue missions. As seen with Hurricane Katrina, not mobilizing resources quickly has a tremendous impact on human life and recovery efforts. In the storm’s aftermath, many public and private agencies were ready to assist, but without accurate location references and common data of what lay on the ground there were long delays in providing relief to scared and stranded residents.

During the last five years, there has been a fundamental shift in the rate at which satellite images are accessed and used, and the total amount of the world’s landscape that is imaged each day continues to grow rapidly. Even more importantly, this additional imagery is coming from commercial providers that now offer imagery provisioning and servicing. With rapid, repeat access to large areas of the world’s terrain, first responders, whether military or humanitarian, no longer have to worry about a steady stream of world imagery. What concerns them today is how to integrate sophisticated satellite technology seamlessly into their opera-tions and how to manage accessible imagery on an ongoing basis.

Until now, several technical issues have hindered access to confirmed, up-to-date imagery in the first line of response. First, there has been a lack of bandwidth and access to systems that can support in-theatre image processing and computer-intensive manipulation. Second, access to imagery at central command posts hasn’t supported widely distributed field access, where mission planning and knowledge assessment occurs. Third, multiple knowledge points have used different formats and integration methods to assimilate satellite imagery with other geospatial software and applications.

Similar challenges have been met on the civilian front, as the threat of natural disasters frequently requires the interaction of many government and relief agencies. During a hurricane, for example, agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) often require commercial imagery data of the land mass areas in the hurricane’s path and have periodic reviews and updates during the post-recovery process.

Satellite imagery is no longer just a cartographic tool; it currently enjoys more widespread adoption as an analytical, decision-support solution, contextualizing and analyzing critical inquiries: What’s currently on the ground? What on the ground has changed? What’s the proximity to access? What’s the condition of the terrain? Satellite imagery also has become a seamless base layer to create more precise, feature-rich digital maps.

Deploying Online Imagery Services
The advent of comprehensive online imagery solutions meets the growing demand from geospatial intelligence providers and emergency workers for rapid imagery access. These Web-based solutions overcome the technical barriers and accessibility issues found when trying to share key satellite views across an array of communities, users and applications. Web services, when designed to support multiple third-party commercial or government applications, allow rapid acquisition and dissemination of imagery to front-line responders. As a result, a single image can be widely disseminated without the overhead of reprocessing, format changes or complex integration
efforts.

Building a standard, off-the-shelf imagery product for military use is extremely limiting because of the number of permutations that a single image has to go through to support the diverse viewing population of the armed forces. Web services provide programmatic access to stores of high-resolution imagery and rapidly deliver highly customizable, adaptable solutions to all of these diverse constituencies. Such solutions include several primary building blocks to ensure success (see “Essential Components of Effective Web Solutions” below).

Real-World Response
Satellite imagery provider DigitalGlobe has used its Web services offering to create a crisis event service (CES), a disaster-analysis solution based on rapid access and historical content catalogs delivered online for seamless access and integration. By providing federal, state and local first-response organizations with access to the same crisis event service across multiple portals with current and historic imagery responders are better equipped to make emergency-preparedness decisions, such as the need to evacuate the region or to deploy the National Guard. This side-by-side comparison allows agencies and war fighters to analyze and monitor changes for environmental conditions, street access, infrastructure sustainability and safe harbor points.

After a disaster strikes, there’s a continued demand for fresh imagery, as governments and response organizations require new images to monitor storm damage and rebuilding efforts. In the event of widespread devastation, satellite imagery may be the only way to provide an effective ground-truth and access point. Through Web services, new images of the affected areas can be available to first responders within 24 hours of collection, which is critical to timely relief, rescue and reconstruction efforts.

Other fluid landscapes, such as after a major offensive initiative, can also reveal dramatic differences in terrain and infrastructure. For both military and humanitarian efforts, rapid-access Web services can create the most accurate ground truth prior to a major event. Imagery can be collected 24 hours prior to the physical event, and subsequent imagery can be collected for comparison purposes. The speed at which the visual intelligence can deploy relief efforts or make changes to military operations provides an enormous impact on survival efforts and security.

The Future of Adaptable Imagery Solutions
Imagery Web services provide users - whether defense and intelligence officers, relief workers or those in many other industries—with
timely, accurate access to critical geospatial intelligence to solve some of their most pressing issues. Web services can also provide long-term access to scientists monitoring ice flows in the Arctic who require specific metadata and longer-term historical analysis. Through Web services, end users have the option to have on-demand access to as much or as little data as they need.

As satellite imagery providers continue to make strides in greater collection capabilities and in economically accessible multi-industry imagery products, the demand for current and predictable imagery continues to increase. As the demand for improved utilization of imagery as a decision- and analysis-solution increases, Web services will become the industry standard as the way to acquire, disseminate and embed geospatial data quickly, across multiple platforms, into workflows and applications.

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