Spent last week in sunny Scottsdale, AZ attending the ESRI Homeland Security GIS Summit where I had the opportunity to demonstrate Virtual Earth as a visualization platform to attendees from State and Local governments nationwide. Naturally, the ESRI/Microsoft partnership and the integration it allows between ArcGIS and Virtual Earth was of particular interest to this crowd, as was the plume modeling demo that I have shared here before.
On a somewhat related note, I learned just prior to this conference that in response to the Hurricane Ike disaster, the Microsoft Virtual Earth team provided* over 1100 high-resolution aerial photos of post-Ike imagery to emergency responders in coordination with Microsoft’s Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART). The imagery of the area was captured on the first clear day, processed in record time, and was quickly distributed to those who needed it most. Apparently these efforts produced the first high-resolution imagery of the disaster aftermath.*
And on THAT note, I recently met Brian Timoney of the The Timoney Group who shared with me their Virtual Earth based Gulf Impact map that tracked the hurricane to measure impact to local oil and gas platforms.
Well, pipeline, and platform data was downloaded in August, 2008. The last two years of well production were downloaded in August and each active well was assigned a daily production of oil and gas based on a weighted average of its last six months of reported activity. Receiving a live feed of updated storm locations from HurricaneMapping.com, the analysis you see here was updated dynamically on the fly using a spatial database (PostgreSQL/PostGIS).
Another great example of Virtual Earth as a platform for visualization of critical data and better situational awareness in emergency scenarios.


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