Hawai‘i / Oahu / Pearl Harbor - Ford Island

Target Area

• size of Ford Island - extents roughly 1920 meters E-W, 1800 meters N-S
• according to the DEM, most of the island is nearly flat at < 6 m, with a very small 11 m hill at the eastern tip
• connected to land via a bridge in the east, built in 1996-1998
• airstrip in the center, runway is 1.2 km long, 44 m wide -  set to be phased out, to become open space

Reference images

• the site Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields: Hawaii: Southern Oahu Island (unreachable in 2012) has a section on Luke Field / Ford Island Naval Auxiliary Landing Field (HVG) with statistics, historical and recent photos:
   

Data Availability

• elevation
  • the 10m Oahu DEMs are high-quality and have good detail in Pearl Harbor
  • the contours do not match exactly with the culture; e.g. the runway in the center of the island is certainly flat, but the DEM shows a variation of 1-2 meters over that area
  • extracted a 10km * 10km area at 2049*2049 (roughly 5m spacing)
• images
  • have a mono aerial, resolution 0.36 m/pixel (almost 1 foot/pixel), size 5330*4980 for the extents of the island
    • must be a very recent photo, since the bridge (1998) is present
  • derived an artificial 2k bitmap (land/water + shading) from the elevation grid
  • in PhotoShop, overlaid the mono aerial on the 2k bitmap, to supply geospecific detail for the island (still quite blurry at 5m)
  • Commercial Ikonos 0.8-meter pan-merge satellite imagery is available, although color quality is poor.
    Thumbnails and small excerpt:
    
  • Public 2004 Oahu Aerials (0.3m) have much better quality and detail than the satellite imagery,
    thumbnail and excerpt:
    
     
• roads
  • the aerial shows many roads on the island
  • ordered and received transportation DLG files for Oahu, 16 tiles * 4 layers, along with hydro for alignment purposes
  • interestingly, the road layer contains the new bridge!
• ground cover
  • could be derived from a color aerial, need data, or GIS layer

Data Needed

• need more color reference photos of the buildings on the island, to extract correct values for the building properties

DRG detail

DLG detail