County to Update Arial Imagery
Contact Greene County Commissioners
724-852-5210
spenich@co.greene.pa.us
County to Update Arial Imagery
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
WAYNESBURG - The County of Greene has contracted with Eagleview Technologies, dba Pictometry International, to provide updated LiDAR data and high resolution imagery of the entire county. The LiDAR data will be collected, by airplane, during the last half of October, 2020. The aerial images will be collected during the last half of November 2020, again, by plane, and with the intention of capturing “leaf-off” images. Residents may very well see these flights as the planes will collect elevation data and pictures from the Monongahela river to our western border with West Virginia and from Washington County to our southern border with West Virginia, going back and forth across the county dozens of times.
Pictometry images assign every pixel in an image an elevation, a latitude and a longitude. This allows county and municipal users to analyze any object in the image and obtain exact measurements with respect to position, length, width, area, slope, height and elevation. It allows users to annotate and compare year-over-year images and is used in county offices for many purposes to include: Assessment for appraisal information, the entire judicial system for crime scene analysis and distance to schools in drug-related cases, Information Technology for the County wireless network and physical security applications, Emergency Management and the 911 Center for emergency service response, and the Department of Planning and Community Development for residential, commercial and industrial site information for development purposes and blighted property identification. The County is also planning new uses for the data, to include the upcoming Tax Claim Office judicial and repository sale, to help potential buyers identify properties of interest.
LiDAR data collection has not been performed since 2006. This service captures elevations with vertical accuracy sufficient to produce 1-foot contours, with a .7-meter post spacing across all 617 Square miles of the county, and will be used to process the aerial imagery that will follow.
The Imagery flight will provide high resolution (3 inches per pixel) oblique color imagery in all 4 cardinal directions and “straight down” orthogonal images of the entire county. Post-processing will provide building outlines created from the orthogonal images in the 2020 imagery and our 2017 imagery, allowing the County Assessment Office to identify changes in building outlines and new structures across the entire county. Finally, the new imagery and elevation data will be added to the County Pictometry Connect web application, in conjunction with County GIS layers such as parcels, streets, municipal boundaries, structures, streams, watershed, waterline and sewage line layers that can be used remotely by the county, townships, boroughs, water and sewer authorities, school districts, sewage enforcement officers, tax collectors and the engineers of those organizations. The County’s agreement with Pictometry prohibits the use of the county data by individuals or businesses that are not employed by, or part of, a subdivision of the County.
While the county has been using Pictometry since 2006, this unscheduled flight, elevation data collection, and post-processing ChangeFinder analysis will provide the county with the capability to work remotely and comply with social distancing restrictions, in accordance with CDC guidelines, with better outcomes than previously obtainable. The entire project is funded by Federal CARES Act funds provided to the County of Greene via the State of Pennsylvania and follows the strict restrictions that go along with that funding: The project must be Covid-response related, the use was not budgeted in the current year budget, and the funding must be spent by December 30th of 2020.
Additional information can be obtained on the Greene County Commissioner’s Facebook page or by calling (724) 852-5210.