The history of the USDA/Emerge aerial photos of Hawai‘i

(USGS/USDA (NRCS/APFO) NAPP/DOQ)

• 1999: Emerge / ESpatialWeb gets a contract to gather imagery data for all the islands
  • Emerge was a subsidiary / spin-off of Litton/TASC (which was itself later merged into Northrop Grumman)
  • press release: 'Litton TASC's Emerge Subsidiary Wins Major Contract to Produce Digital Imagery for State of Hawaii'
  • commissioned by USDA's Farm Service Agency and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), administered by the USDA Aerial Photography Field Office (APFO) in Salt Lake City
  • for unknown reasons, the contract was to deliver false color IR, rather than more useful multi-spectral imagery that would include a blue band
• 2000.01.20:
  • they are primarily gathering IR imagery, but the sensor reportedly does have "other bands"
  • they are having the usual trouble finding any clear days to fly.
• 2000.06.06:
  • data collection began in Feb. 2000, reportedly have done around 25% of the coverage
• 2003.09.16:
  • (three years later) they are mostly done - a coverage map shows the majority of tiles are collected
• 2003.09.29:
  • the HIGICC Hawai'i I-Plan version 1.1 (pdf) said:
  • "NRCS owns this data, but makes it available to the geospatial community in Hawai‘i in MrSID format.  Issue: Slow completion of this dataset over several years, as well as quality control issues, is causing GIS analysts to look elsewhere for similar data. Also, digital pixel mosaic, false color IR is not the optimum format for some applications; it is neither a good multispectral dataset nor is it a natural looking/layman accessible backdrop for the display of vector data or other information."
• sometime in late 2003 or early 2004, AirPhotoUSA apparently acquired the Emerge data and did some reprocessing to approximate truecolor imagery, then commercially licensed the result
• 2004.08 status:
  • The NRCS "Imagery" page links back to the USGS APFO site which doesn't have anything for Hawai‘i.  Correspondence with Geoff at the APFO resulted in a status map pdf (right), although it isn't actually on any government website.
• 2004.09 status:
  • the USGS Hawai'i Data Clearinghouse website has giant 3 MrSID files of the Emerge imagery: (1) Kaua'i (2) Oahu (3) Maui, Lana'i, Moloka'i, Kaho'olawe.  The Big Island isn't there yet, and the colors are RGB mapped in some unknown fashion from the original color-infrared bands.
• 2004.11 status:
  • Attempting to find the original bands, or at least a description of what bands were captured.  Contacted Henry Wolter (USGS, Honolulu).  He directed me to Pat Shade (GIS Coordinator for NRCS, Honolulu).  Pat directed me to Tony Kimmet (NRCS, Fort Worth).  Pat said "In Hawaii all we ever received from this contract was processed imagery.  Tony would either have or know if raw band files are available."  I emailed Tony on 11/4.
  • Henry Wolter was kind enough to loan me a DVD copy of the Emerge tiles that the USGS has for all the islands!  Most of the data was fine, but DVD read errors prevented me from reading a few tiles on the Big Island, numbered 2742 to 2763.
• 2005.01 status:
  • Contacted by Tony Kimmet.  He says: It's nearly certain that only 3 bands were captured: IR,Red,Green.  They received these bands as raw DOQ tiles.  Pat Shade has these same raw tiles.  He left a message for an APFO person to confirm that no other bands were captured.  He recommends trying out the ERDAS Imagine capability for a rough conversion of CIR to RGB.
  • Also, there are a few tiles which were captured, but weren't delivered (e.g. they had 5% cloud cover, contract requires 0%) and some people have actually acquired these to fill in the gaps in the tile coverage.  You'd have to contact Emerge.
• 2005.02 status:
  • Contacted by Jaymes Pardue, who had been assigned to the Emerge project from 2001 to June 2003, after the project was already going and in trouble.  Jaymes fills in several parts of the story:
  • The reason that Emerge captured (R,G,IR) is that their sensor cannot capture 4 bands at a time.  A blue filter was placed in front of the sensor, and the resulting light is split into R,G,IR.  Emerge was indeed frustrated by the original contract to deliver 0% cloud cover.  The decision was made after several years to start passing on data with up to 10% cloud cover to the USDA, just so they would have something in difficult areas.  One challenge was getting pilots stationed on each island; e.g. when it is clear in Hilo, a pilot from Honolulu could not fly there in time before the clouds would roll in.  Emerge deserves credit for sticking with the project, which paid $600k but surely cost them far more to deliver.
  • All the data including the partially-clouded tiles were delivered to the USDA, and there was a very slow turnaround (up to a year) before it got passed on to the State.
• 2005.03 status:
  • The USGS Hawai'i Data Clearinghouse now has their Big Island Emerge MrSID file online (571MB compressed!)
• Remaining Q: Where did all the partially-clouded tiles go, where are they now?