Vertical Aerial Photography

Vertical aerial photography is an airborne mapping technique, which uses a high-resolution camera mounted vertically underneath the aircraft to capture reflected light in the red, green, blue and for some datasets, near infra-red spectrum. Images of the ground are captured at resolutions between 10cm and 50cm, and ortho-rectified using simultaneous LIDAR and GPS to a high spatial accuracy. The Environment Agency has been capturing vertical aerial photography data regularly since 2006 on a project by project basis each ranging in coverage from a few square kilometers to hundreds of square kilometers. Historic data are available for some areas where we have carried out repeat surveys. The photography is supplied as a raster dataset in ECW (enhanced compressed wavelet) format as either a true colour (RGB), near infra-red (NIR) or a 4-band (RGBN) dataset. Where imagery has been captured under incident response conditions and the lighting conditions may be sub-optimal this is defined by the prefix IR. The data are presented as tiles in British National Grid OSGB 1936 projections. Data is available in 5km download zip files for each year of survey. Within each downloaded zip file are ECW files aligned to the Ordinance Survey grid. The size of each tile is dependent upon the spatial resolution of the data. Index metadata shapefiles are also available to download. The catalogue shapefiles contain metadata for each tile, including the start and end date flown, type of survey and spatial resolution. This metadata record is for Approval for Access product AfA462. Attribution statement: © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2019. All rights reserved. Attribution statement: © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2019. All rights reserved.