Wisconsin Geospatial News

2015 NAIP imagery coming soon

Imagery data from the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) are expected to be available from the NRCS Geospatial Data Gateway within the next month.

Surdex, the contractor selected to acquire imagery for Wisconsin on behalf of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was originally scheduled to fly the state between June 6th and August 31st of this year.

The actual flight dates ranged from June 27th through October 11th, with the majority of the acquisitions happening in July and September.  As a result of the fall flights, imagery in portions of the state has a distinctive orange/brown resulting from the fall foliage. (See this interactive map for more details on fight dates in your area.)

The specifications for the imagery remain unchanged compared to past years.   The spatial resolution of the Compressed County Mosaics (CCMs) is 1-meter.  The CCMs are delivered in MrSID format as three-band natural color files, using a UTM Zone 15 or 16 coordinate system.  Spatial accuracy is +/- 6 meters, but in the past the actual measured accuracy has been far better than the design specification.

Traditionally, the NAIP CCMs have been re-processed into the Wisconsin Transverse Mercator coordinate system, and made available for download from the WisconsinView Data Portal.  In addition, the original 4-band (r, g, b, near-infrared) GeoTIFFs have also been available as a free download from WisconsinView.  As I write this, no timeline has been set the re-processing and transfer to WisconsinView.