My First Mashup

Posts Tagged ‘aerial’

Aerial Mapping – California provides an amazing array of services for creating aerial surveys, maps and pictures of California. These services include aerial mapping, surveys, GPS integration, aerial photography, orthophotography, topographic mapping, and aerial volume studies. California has a wide variety of companies and services.

Aerial mapping companies are used commercially by developers, realtors, planners and civil engineers for various development projects, including environmental impact reports. Surveys are used for small individual boundary issues to the retracing of subdivision dividing lines.

The GIS, used by many non profit and government agencies, is a topographic map that shows important sites in the community such as fire stations, schools, hospitals, and infrastructure lines such as telephone and electrical. Thus an emergency worker in a city can bring up these locations on a computer screen in times of disaster when regular utility services are not functioning.

Aerial mapping company California resources are also used by non-profit organizations. The California Coastal Records Project has recorded aerial photographic surveys of the entire California Coastline. This technology has been used by other California organizations, such as Cal State Northridge, Whittier College, and the California Aerial and Acoustic Sardine Survey.

Aerial mapping is used to develop topographic and hydrographic mapping. Contour overlays are added to create the commonly known “topo” map, produced by the United States Forest Service for Forest Service and Wilderness lands. The US Geographical Survey (USGS) has jointly managed Land Sat, or Land Remote Sensing Satellite system, with NASA since 1972, to gather information about the earth’s surface resources. This data is available and used by aerial mapping companies.

Orthophotography, used by many companies, is the practice of correcting aerial photographs so the resulting photographs show the same uniform scale as a flat map. Thus distances can be measured to actual scale, showing correct distances since the map has been adjusted to account for the curve of the earth’s surface shown in the original aerial photograph.

You can see that sources for mapping data are very broad. Companies are based throughout the state of California. They provide a variety of services, from surveying and mapping for engineering projects to scenic photographs including hot air balloon rides and even weddings pictured from the air.

There is a strong overlap of networks in this field ranging from University programs to NASA and other government agencies such as USGS. Private companies know how to access the important elements of these networks. Many companies have been in business for years going back to the 1940’s in some cases. The consumer will be well rewarded by researching and comparing the various companies’ demonstrated expertise.

For more information visit California Aerial Mapping.