To recipients of the EPA ASPECT mission KML file:
Please find the attached KML file, which will act as your Situational Awareness Tool Capability (SAT) key to the EPA ASPECT mission data coverage and report information for this event.
You will need an up-to-date free copy of Google Earth, the current version we are using is [Google Earth 4.3.7284.3916(beta)], access to the unclassified internet, and an up-to-date version of either, Internet Explorer, Netscape, or Firefox as your internet browser.
How to use the attached KML file:
1. Save the KML file to your desktop.
2. To open it, double click it and it will bring up your Google Earth Program, and the EPA ASPECT airplane ICON will appear and zoom to the geographic area of the mission.
3. In your Google Earth window under places you will see under temporary places an icon titled [whatever the mission name is]. Double Click it and underneath you will see the airplane icon and [EPA ASPECT Mission Name]. Click it and you will see an expandable balloon. In this expandable balloon you will see all of the relevant information for this particular EPA ASPECT mission.
Note:
The relevant information available may vary from mission to mission. The
following are examples of data and information made accessible by the SAT tool:
A brief mission description.
Sensor suite
capabilities
Relevant chemical
information
Color aerial photography
False color aerial infrared imagery
Aircraft
Weather station data (used for chemical plume modeling)
All of the sections depicted in blue above are SAT links to data on the EPA ASPECT mission website. Simply clicking on any of the blue sections will activate that information link. What happens next depends on what link you have activated.
The following are brief descriptions of how to use each link: Note: Be patient. How fast things occur depends on your network and computer speeds:
Click on Sensor suite capabilities and a description will appear in a separate browser window. To close it, merely close the browser window.
Click
on Color aerial photography and you will see the transparent outline of each
EPA ASPECT aerial photograph. To load the actual imagery into Google
Earth, click on a camera icon in one of the polygons. Another expandable
balloon will appear, simply click on the download image overlay and the ASPECT
aerial photograph will overlay on the Google Earth imagery database.
Repeat this process for as many images as you are interested in. Note:
each time you execute this procedure the referenced aerial photograph frame
will appear in blue in you temporary places pane on the left hand side of the
Google Earth window. Should you want to view a full resolution image of
this frame, merely click on that frame in the temporary places window and
another expandable balloon will appear. Simply click on Full Resolution
Image and it will appear in a separate browser window. Note: You can also
download the full resolution image and geo-positioning information as a image.jpg - image.jpw file for
direct insertion into most GIS databases.
All other links work similarly and you should be able to navigate easily through them at this point.
Note: When exiting Google Earth you can save your temporary places so that they will be available the next time you want to look at this data. Alternatively, you can merely keep the KML file as your SAT key index into the EPA ASPECT website for accessing this data at a future time.
Please address your Google Earth SAT product questions to:
Paul Lewis, NGA,
703-735-2570
Dr. Mark Thomas, EPA, CELL: 816-718-4271