November 29, 2011 -- Getmapping has supplied Enfield Council with 2011 aerial photography of the whole of this busy London borough. The photography was captured using a Vexcel digital camera at very high resolution from a height of 2,500 feet which requires special permission from Air Traffic Control. The imagery delivers a ground sampled distance (GSD) of 5cm per image pixel. This provides exceptional ground detail enabling close scrutiny of multiple assets such as street furniture, road markings, trees and buildings.
The imagery is available to everyone across the authority’s intranet via a web based GIS together with Ordnance Survey maps, older aerial surveys and selected GIS layers according to job description. The data is also used together with oblique imagery from a previous survey by the planning department in the unique Multivision software environment which enables obliques taken from four directions to be viewed in conjunction with a central vertical image.
“The quality of the latest 5cm vertical imagery is excellent and detail such as street furniture can be clearly seen,” said Dave Pullinger, GIS Mapping Officer. “The imagery is used daily throughout the Council via its intranet. We are currently using it within our GIS software to accurately map all allotment plots on the 37 sites in Enfield. The imagery is also used extensively to resolve planning and enforcement issues.”
“The latest data was captured in June 2011 at 5cm resolution simply because that is what we had had before,” said Lee Merrison, GIS Team Leader at Enfield Council. “Nobody wanted to revert to 10cm data, which although still very good provides less detail of what’s on the ground. The imagery acts as a terrific base map to which everyone has access. It has become a vital tool in so many areas of Council activity that we have now instituted a two year update cycle complemented by oblique images which will be re-captured during 2012.”