LONGMONT, Colo., August 10, 2004 – DigitalGlobe®, provider of the world’s highest resolution commercial satellite imagery and geospatial information products, announces it has won a contract with the County of Maui to provide cloud-free satellite imagery of the entire county for multi-departmental use. Data applications include property parcel inventory and management, transportation planning, spatial growth modeling, emergency preparedness, civil defense, and disaster management and assessment.
The County of Maui is replacing its outdated base set of aerial imagery data with DigitalGlobe’s two-foot resolution, 3-band, natural color pan-sharpened 1”= 400’ orthomosaics. The data will be critical to supporting several multi-departmental projects throughout the county, including the Planning Department and the Department of Management’s GIS Division, which provides county-wide GIS services.
“Maui County will recognize significant time and monetary savings through the implementation of DigitalGlobe imagery,” said Maui County Mayor Alan M. Arakawa. “Perhaps more importantly, this relationship will allow for more current, meaningful and accurate imagery data than we have ever had. In addition, our relationship with DigitalGlobe offers the ability to maintain current imagery over the years, as needed.”
According to county officials, the county is working to properly manage and balance the wildland-urban interface in response to the increased numbers of people relocating to Maui. The DigitalGlobe data will be critical in enabling Maui to build a spatial growth model for assessing and managing its growing population. When completed, the spatial growth model will provide a population forecast looking 50 years into the future, helping to foresee the land management requirements of Maui and govern policies to address them in advance.
“Historically, we have used aerial imagery for mapping the county, but it posed certain barriers such as cloud cover, image updates, and the limitations of film-based ortho-products. We are confident that DigitalGlobe will help us overcome these barriers with its high-resolution, multi-spectral satellite imagery,” said Bill Medeiros, the county’s GIS manager. “Maui’s unique geographical and meteorological characteristics make it a difficult location to image, and DigitalGlobe is overcoming those challenges by mosaicing several data sets, creating cloud-free coverage of the entire county.”
About DigitalGlobe
DigitalGlobe is the clear leader in the global commercial Earth imagery and geospatial information market. The company’s technical superiority and innovation, unparalleled commitment to customer service, extensive business partner network and open systems philosophy make DigitalGlobe the preferred supplier of satellite and aerial imagery and value-added products. In 2001, DigitalGlobe launched what remains the world’s highest resolution commercial satellite today, QuickBird. The company will launch its next-generation WorldView system no later than 2006, while the competition has no plans to launch a satellite comparable to either QuickBird or WorldView before 2008. QuickBird has collected and stored in its ImageLibrary hundreds of thousands of Earth image scenes covering over a hundred million square kilometers, and collects an additional one million square kilometers each week. These new and historical images are essential for customers who map and plan for change in our world. DigitalGlobe is based in Longmont, Colo., USA. For more information visit www.digitalglobe.com.