From hurricanes along its coast to the breakup
of the space shuttle Columbia in its skies, Texas is no stranger
to disaster.
A team at The University of Texas at Austin’s
Center for Space Research (CSR)
is using satellites and sophisticated software to help the state
prepare for disasters and their aftermaths.
Last July, the CSR team, led by Dr. Gordon Wells,
tracked Hurricane Claudette while compiling information from 34
state agencies responding
to the emergency to put help where it
was most needed.
“They can see where the state’s assets
are in real time,” says Wells, program manager
of the CSR unit doing the mapping.
Wells’ group within CSR is called the Mid-American
Geospatial Information Center (MAGIC). It grabs information from
satellites—such as the path of Claudette—and other
remote sensing instruments and applies ground information—such
as databases of evacuation routes—and shows their relationships.
Wells and his team tracked the storm around
the clock as it rolled along the coast. When Claudette appeared
headed for the Brownsville-Matamoras area, the CSR maps showed
the area’s shelters and other operations. Then as Claudette’s
path shifted farther up the coast, so did the representations
from the CSR. The storm made landfall on July 15 near Port O’Connor,
about 100 miles up the coast from Corpus Christi.
Even after Claudette left Texas, Wells and his
team were still collecting and organizing information—this
time on the damage left by the storm’s short tour of Texas.
In February 2003, the unit helped in the search
for debris from the space shuttle Columbia. Working with information
from the field, Wells and his crew rapidly put together maps of
where the shuttle debris fell. The quick action helped officials
secure the locations and get an early look at the pattern of the
debris, which would help them try to determine what happened.
Wells is a mapping specialist who’s worked
for NASA, teaching astronauts how to take scientifically-useful
photos of the Earth from space, and the state of Texas, where
he worked on assembling digital maps of the state and its resources.
Wells and his team perform a variety of mapping
duties. They’ve tracked water storage and use across the
Rio Grande Basin in Mexico, where sharing of water resources has
been a point of contention between the United States and Mexico.
Using satellite imagery, Wells can see water filling Mexican reservoirs
and land greening up where it’s been irrigated.
They’ve also put together detailed elevation
maps of the Brownsville area, tracked wildfire damage and monitored
previous flashfloods and storms along the coast.
In the case of the shuttle, the maps showed more
than where the debris landed. They could show what kind of soil
was in an area, indicating how deep a shuttle piece might have
been buried. Satellite images collected after the disaster showed
breaks in the tree canopies which might have been caused by falling
debris.
MAGIC is based with the Center for Space Research
in the MCC building in north Austin. Through two new receiving
stations and another station—the white domes on the building’s
roof—every day the group collects 20-30 gigabytes of information,
the rough equivalent of downloading 9,000 songs, from several
satellites.
The information is beamed down from satellites
controlled by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency
as well as those operated by India and China. The data flow will
increase about 10 times in 2005 when MAGIC becomes a collection
facility for a new German radar satellite mission.
During emergencies such as Hurricane Claudette,
the team works from a spot front and center in the state’s
emergency operations center to provide up-to-date information
to the state emergency coordinator.
CSR also incorporates into its mapping information
from airborne laser technology such as the university’s
LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) mapping system.
Wells’ goal is to combine much of this
information with that contained in state databases of roads, bridges,
houses, schools, petrochemical plants and many other assets to
help plan and deal with disasters.
“It’s a big confidence builder for
them to be able to see, hour-by-hour, the state putting these
things into place,” he says.
“If an event occurs, then we will combine
GPS locations with digital aerial photography so that the field
analysis of damage can be put in context with the mapping,” Wells
says. “I think in the future we can do damage analysis much
more efficiently and accurately.”
