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The North Carolina 911 Board awarded a grant of $12.3 million to the City of Durham’s Emergency Communications Center on September 25, 2009 for acquisition of statewide ortho imagery (aerial photography for base mapping purposes). The City of Durham recognized that the value of up-to-date, consistent orthoimagery would apply equally to its neighboring counties. The current situation in North Carolina is a patchwork of imagery (years captured and resolutions) and a slow pace of new imagery acquisition in difficult economic times. The Durham PSAP concluded that a statewide project would maximize benefits in a timely way.
The project goal was to have a continuous statewide layer of high resolution imagery of the same spatial and temporal resolution.
The imagery was acquired between January and April 2010. The imagery is now available for viewing. For the general public, the easiest way to view the imagery is using a Google Earth image service. A Google Earth .kmz file is available for download here.
This was a massive project. Each tile is 5,000 x 5,000 feet with a ground resolution of 6 inches per pixel, amounting to 100,000,000 pixels per tile. Statewide, there are approximately 60,200 tiles over land and water. That equals 6,020,000,000,000 (6.02 trillion) pixels for the entire state.
The current plan for future imagery is to divide the state into four regions and acquire imagery on a rotating basis every four years.
More information can be found at NC OneMap.
Enjoy!
