You know your presentation was successful when:
1) Nobody threw rotten fruit
2) People came up to me afterwards and said “I have photos I can get to you”
3) A high level official at NCDC requests a copy of my presentation “as soon as you can get it to me”
alot of those bases aren’t restricted access anymore due to BRAC. Kelly and Brooks in San Antonio shouldn’t be hard to get, unless the Kelly station is in the part that got transferred to Lackland. Ellington is also open access I believe. I either work directly or have coworkers who do field work on Laughlin(TX), Vance(OK), Columbus(MS), and Reese(TX), as well as several other Army and AF sites. I will start asking around and see what it might take to get access to those stations.
California and other states have free copies of aerial photographs (DOQQs) taken by the USGS. In california, these are dated in the mid 1990’s, and can give a 10 year old comparison for current google or microsoft maps to see what’s changed in the last 10 years. I’ve done a comparison for Newport Beach and e-mailed it in to surfacesites.org (haven’t heard if they got it), but it shows removal of trees, expansion of parking lots, more cars, etc… For california DOQQ’s can be obtained FREE from
http://gis.ca.gov/ims.epl
click on
Calsil geofinder
to locate DOQQ’s in all counties of California. The DOQQs are big (45 MB) but can be downloaded, then trimeed in photoshop to area around a station site, and compared to a google or microsoft maps image of the same site. DOQQ’s are about 1 meter resolution.
The USDA also has a website for accessing their DOQQ library, haven’t had time to check it out yet. It’s at
http://datagateway.nrcs.usda.gov/
Accessing these DOQQs is one way to identify what’s changed in the last 10 years at a station site.