Several agencies collaborated in the aftermath of Hurricane Isabel to assess the storm’s impacts on Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout National Seashores on the North Carolina Outer Banks. Once the storm had made landfall in North Carolina, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) flew the coast and deployed a new research digital aerial-photography system. The tool recorded coordinates associated with1.2-foot-resolution digital images and aircraft positional and attitude data. In response to the need for rapid assessment of hurricane impacts, the USGS Rocky Mountain Mapping Center is developing a method to process poststorm imagery and make it available to land managers. Their technique uses the aircraft positional and attitude data to ortho-rectify or correct the aerial imagery through a batch process, saving many hours of processing time. The imagery will be made available to the public over the Internet. Users will be able to call up the images in mosaics corresponding to regions of interest.
The USGS Center for Coastal and Watershed Studies and NASA also collected pre- and poststorm EAARL (Experimental Advanced Airborne Research Lidar) data to analyze the impacts of the hurricane. The high level of detail in these topographic and ocean-floor data provides a way to quantify amounts of sediment moved by the storm and understand the geologic impacts in the national seashores. Maps produced for a new inlet area at Cape Hatteras in the days following the storm helped natural resource managers visualize the new shape of the park.
