KU News Release

KU research plane provides aerial imagery to aid Greensburg recovery

LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas airplane is contributing to recovery efforts in Greensburg, a small Kansas town devastated by a tornado earlier this month.

Flights of KU’s Cessna 182, equipped with research-grade aerial imaging system, are usually planned weeks or months in advance and typically support a range of research projects — from forestry studies in Yellowstone National Park to mapping invasive aquatic species in Cheyenne Bottoms.

In the aftermath of the tornado that hit Greensburg on May 4, the Kansas Applied Remote Sensing Program, a research unit within the Kansas Biological Survey, deployed the plane to Kiowa County to collect images. Working with the Ivan Weichert, the state’s geographic information systems coordinator, KARS is making the imagery available to federal, state and local agencies to support recovery and reconstruction activities.

“Timely and high-resolution rectified imagery, when coupled with digital layers of property ownership boundaries, provides a very accurate picture of percentages and values of monetary loss to report to FEMA and insurance companies, which allows recovery and rebuilding plans to move forward more quickly,” Weichert said.

Both natural color and color-infrared images were acquired in the Greensburg area. In color-infrared images, healthy vegetation appears red and bare ground or manmade objects do not. Vegetation that is stressed or damaged by the high winds of the tornado is easily identified in the color-infrared imagery. Debris in outlying, agricultural areas is also easily distinguished

Through the KansasView program, KARS staff members also have been fielding information requests and working closely with a variety of agencies, including the State of Kansas Data Access and Support Center, housed at the Kansas Geological Survey, to collect and disseminate existing pre-tornado aerial photography and data.

Image downloads are available online.

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