NOAA aircraft capture aerial imagery of Midwest floods
Aerial photo of Cape Girardeau, Missouri during a Mississippi River flooding event in January 2016. NOAA's National Geodetic Survey supplies such imagery to the public and emergency managers.
From Jan. 2-18, 2016, a team of NOAA aviators aboard NOAA's Beechcraft King Air 350 CER and Gulfstream Turbo (Jet Prop) Commander AC-695A collected aerial images of flooding along the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers using their specialized remote-sensing equipment. The imagery is available to the public online from the NOAA National Ocean Service's National Geodetic Survey. Natural resource and emergency managers rely on data collected by NOAA aircraft to inform decisions and create and update a variety of products, including damage assessments, flood and weather forecasts, and nautical charts.