MoreLeica Geosystems GIS & Mapping LLC announced North West Group has obtained its third Leica ADS40 Airborne Digital Sensor, which will better enable the company to deliver the highest quality digital imagery to its customers.
The team of North West Group, EarthData and Horizons have worked together to acquire imagery for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Farm Service Agency (FSA) National Agriculture Inventory Project (NAIP) since 2003. The team has been awarded approximately 41,000 digital orthophoto quarter-quadrangles (DOQQs), to be produced using the Leica ADS40 digital sensor. This award is for the states of California and Montana at 1m resolution and a repeat award of the state of Texas at 2 meter resolution. This follows on the team's 2004 success with the Idaho, Texas (1 meter) and Louisiana (2 meter) NAIP award.
The goal of NAIP is to acquire current and accurate imagery over all agricultural lands of the continental United States annually, which is used to monitor and manage farm programs. NAIP annually acquires current and accurate imagery over all agricultural lands in the continental United States and delivers it to its various USDA Service Centers. The USDA adheres to two strict requirements in the imagery acquisition process: ortho-imagery must be provided quickly to Service Centers for mandated annual compliance review; and 1 meter ortho-imagery becomes the updated image base layer for the USDA's Geographic Information System (GIS). All imagery collected in the 2004 NAIP program by the North West team can be purchased in a modified format at North West's Valtus Imagery Services web site (www.valtus.com) either as direct download or as a subscription service that allows the data to be seamlessly utilized in any ArcXML or WMS compliant application. The NAIP 2005 imagery will also be available in a similar format from Valtus once completed and accepted by the USDA.
Source: Leica Geosystems GIS & Mapping, June 1, 2005
