PE&RS August 2003

Cover Image

On the afternoon of May 4th a tornado struck Kansas City, the tornado ranged in force from F-1 to F-4. The detailed imagery on the cover shows a small portion of the F-4 damage. The tornado tracked on the ground for over 18 miles, crossing the Missouri River as it moved from Kansas into Missouri, also shown on the cover, dispelling the local myth that tornados won’t stay on the ground while crossing over water. The tornado damaged 1682 structures, caused 42 injuries and one loss of life. The National Weather Service contributes the low loss of life to early warning systems. Most areas had 15-25 minutes early warning of the approaching tornado. Damage estimates were $50-60 million and the area received a Federal Disaster Declaration by President Bush.

The color aerial photography was collected at 6,000’ amt using a Zeiss RMK-A 15-23 camera equipped with FMC, and a POS-510 IMU and ABGPS system. Imagery was scanned using the Vexcel UltraScan 5000 and digital ortho photos were produced of the tornado path with 6" pixel resolution. Using ESRI ArcScene, dynamic 3-D fly-through visualizations of the tornado route were produced.

For more information, contact Scott Perkins, 800-643-5177 or sperkins@westernair.com.

Highlight Article

830 Tornado Aftermath: Providing Timely Geospatial Data for Emergency Relief (Adobe Acrobat 84kb)
Scott Perkins

Peer-Reviewed Articles (Click the linked titles to see the full abstract)

873 Geometric Processing of Ikonos Stereo Imagery for Coastal Mapping Applications
Kaichang Di, Ruijin Ma, and Rongxing Li

The results of photogrammetric mapping of a Lake Erie coastal area from 1-m-resolution Ikonos Geo stereo images are presented.

881 Fast Approximation of Visibility Dominance Using Topographic Features as Targets and the Associated Uncertainty
Sanjay Rana

It is proposed that the use of fundamental topographic features such as peaks, pits, passes, channels, and ridges as targets in line-of-sight analysis reduces the computation time of visibility dominance without any signifant information loss.

889 Mapping Multiple Variables for Predicting Soil Loss by Geostatistical Methods with TM Images and a Slope Map
Guangxing Wang, George Gertner, Shoufan Fang, and Alan B. Anderson

Two geostatistical methods, including collocated cokriging and joint sequential co-simulation, and traditional stratification are compared to jointly map three soil erosion relevant factors and further soil loss by integrating a sample ground data set, TM images, and a slope map.

899 AVHRR-Based Spectral Vegetation Index for Quantitative Assessment of Vegetaton State and Productivity: Calibration and Validation
Felix Kogan, Anatoly Gitelson, Edige Zakarin, Lev Spivak, and Lubov Lebed

Vegetation Condition Index (VCI), calculated as an anomaly of multi-year AVHRR-based NDVI, was strongly correlated (r2 > 0.75) with the anomaly of vegetation density measured on the ground in different ecological zones of Kazakhstan.

907 An Explicit Index for Assessing the Accuracy of Cover-Class Areas
Guofan Shao, Wenchun We, Gang Wu, Xinhua Zhou, and Jianguo Wu

The accuracy of cover class areas is not strongly related to conventional classification accuracy assessment indices, but can be assessed with a new index called Relative Errors of Area ( REA).

915 Potential of Digital Color Imagery for Censusing Haleakala Silverswords in Hawaii
Rick E. Landenberger, James B. McGraw, Timothy A. Warner, and Tomas Brandtberg

The accuracies of manual (photointerpreter) and automated (computer-based) aerial censuses of a rare plant living in an environmentally sensitive habitat are compared.

Announcements
836 ASPRS 2004 Annual Conference: Mountains of Data — Peak Decisions
843 Terrain Data: Applications and Visualization — Making the Connection
844 Call for Papers — PE&RS Special Issue on Mobile Mapping Systems
871 ISPRS — International Workshop on Radiometric and Geometric Calibration

Columns & Updates
833 Grids & Datums — The Republic of Yemen
835 Direct Georeferencing
837 Headquarters News
838 Industry News
844 In Memoriam

Departments
837 New Member List
866 Who’s Who in ASPRS
868 Sustaining Members
870 Classifieds
871 Advertiser Index
872 Calendar
880 Instructions to Authors
914 Forthcoming Articles
924 Bookstore
928 Professional Directory
931 Membership Application

Yearbook
846 Board of Directors (Adobe .pdf  file size 67Kb)
847 ASPRS: The Imaging and Geospatial Information Society (Adobe .pdf  file size 37Kb)
848 Installation of Officers (Adobe .pdf  file size 51Kb)
849 President’s Address (Adobe .pdf  file size 71Kb)
851 Executive Director’s Address (Adobe .pdf  file size 94Kb)
855 Awards Recipients (Adobe .pdf  file size 331Kb)
863 Memorial Address — Thomas A. Hazard (Adobe .pdf  file size 54Kb)
865 Memorial Address — Calvin Fifield(Adobe .pdf  file size 52Kb)

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