Civil Air Patrol - Harvey Oblique Aerial Photos

The Civil Air Patrol is routinely tasked by FEMA and local public safety officials with taking aerial photographs. This collection comprises nearly 30,000 photos taken over the Hurricane Harvey study area, between August 19, 2017 and June 2, 2018. The majority of this collection were taken over southeast Texas from August 10 to September 2, 2017. These were originally uploaded to the web using the GeoPlatform.gov imageUploader capability, and hosted as a web map layer [1]. For this Harvey collection, I exported the dataset of photo location points to a local computer, subset it to the Harvey event, and created a shapefile, which is downloadable below. The photos and thumbnails were not included in this archive, but are attribute-linked to the FEMA-Civil Air Patrol image library on Amazon cloud [2].

The primary resource for these photos is the University of Texas at Austin Center for Space Research (UT CSR), hosted at the Texas Advanced Computational Center (TACC) [3]. These photos are organized by collection date, and each date folder has photo metadata in Javascript (js) and json format files. UT CSR has published a separate web app for browsing these photos [4], as well as several other flood imagery sources.

Note: The cameras used by the Civil Air Patrol do not have an electronic compass with their GPS to record the viewing direction. The easiest way to determine the general angle is to look at consecutive frame counterpoints to establish the flightpath direction at nadir and adjust for the photographer's position behind the pilot looking out the window hatch on the port (left) side of the aircraft. The altitude above ground level is typically between 1000-1500 feet, so it's easy to locate features in reference orthoimages.

Another source of aerial imagery is from the NOAA National Geodetic Survey (NGS) [5]. This imagery was acquired by the NOAA Remote Sensing Division to support NOAA homeland security and emergency response requirements.

References
[1] US federal GeoPlatform.gov Image Uploader map service (ArcGIS Server) [https://imageryuploader.geoplatform.gov/arcgis/rest/services/ImageEvents/MapServer]
[2] FEMA-Civil Air Patrol image library on Amazon cloud [https://fema-cap-imagery.s3.amazonaws.com]
[3] UT CSR primary archive for Harvey photos on TACC [https://web.corral.tacc.utexas.edu/CSR/Public/17harvey/TxCAP/]
[4] UT CSR web app for browsing CAP photos [http://magic.csr.utexas.edu/hurricaneharvey/public/]
[5] NOAA NGS Hurricane Harvey Imagery [https://storms.ngs.noaa.gov/storms/harvey/index.html#7/28.400/-96.690]