Space technology produces earthly reward for Scottsdale

Firefighters from Scottsdale, Ariz., neighboring communities and state and federal agencies confronted with growing frustration the flames that blackened 23,000 acres of the Sonoran Desert and threatened developed areas. Blinded by wind-driven thick smoke, they groped futilely on that July 1995 day to determine the fast-moving fire’s perimeter, its hot spots and where it was traveling. Conventional aerial photographs were useless because smoke obscured the pictures.

Meanwhile, in his office in Scottsdale’s city hall, Wilson Orr found it difficult to concentrate. Apprehensive about the fire and the safety of city neighborhoods, his thoughts wandered to the beleaguered firefighters. Suddenly, he received a call from the pilot of a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) C130B airplane inbound to Scottsdale to do routine data gathering for the city. Having seen the billows of smoke and recognizing the difficult conditions firefighters faced, the pilot suggested using the airplane’s sophisticated computer programs, image scanner and infrared cameras that can penetrate smoke and darkness and peer into hidden canyons to take high altitude pictures and get a more accurate fix on the fire.

“Go ahead,” said Orr, Scottsdale’s director of advanced technology. “Bring the pictures to me, and we’ll see if they are any good.” Less than two hours later Orr had his pictures, and they were very good indeed. With a map of the fire before them, firefighters were able to deploy manpower and material more intelligently, saving at least $250,000 in heavy aerial tanks, logging helicopters and other fire-fighting equipment and personnel needed to extinguish the blaze.

The incident served as a perfect illustration of how remote sensing (RS) from an airplane or earth-orbiting satellite can provide incident managers, such as the fire commander, with timely information to improve decision-making in very practical situations and save money to boot.

The use of such space-age technology to gather information and convert it quickly to easily understood plans at a cost much lower than conventional data-gathering methods is the essence of a program being developed by the city of Scottsdale, NASA and Arizona State University (ASU). When completed, the Advanced Technology Program could revolutionize the way government officials at all levels here and throughout the world gather and assimilate information and set policy.

Program Timetable

Funded by the city, NASA, the Department of Energy, Public Technology Inc.’s Urban Consortium and partnerships with industry, the program has three phases:

* Build a prototype advanced GIS to provide access to a wide variety of RS data such as that gathered by the C-130B flying over the fire. This phase has just been completed.

* Automate, standardize and verify cost savings through two pilot applications, non-point source pollution and air quality monitoring. This phase is scheduled to be completed in 1996.

* Commercialize the technology in 1997, making it available to other municipalities here and abroad.

Not all government employees are under the gun to act as quickly or in such dramatic circumstances as was the incident commander at the Sonoran Desert fire, of course. But they and elected officials, such as city council members, wrestle with issues affecting the health of a community almost daily. Most decisions affect day-to-day operations, but others have far-reaching consequences, especially in communities like Scottsdale that are facing the challenge of retaining a small city environment despite continued growth. All require sound data to make intelligent choices.

“Decisions are at the very heart of government,” Orr says. “Good decisions help us achieve more effective government and get a better return on our investment. After all, government has just two inputs, data and taxes. Our products are solutions to common problems. It could be a pothole on a side street or a capital improvement program downtown.”

Remote sensing and other high tech systems being developed by the program can be invaluable in filling that mundane pothole or mapping the high profile downtown improvement project. Last summer, missions flown by NASA over Scottsdale provided very specific information about pavement conditions, types of buildings downtown and subsurface features of the city as well as information on vegetation and water placement. Trained graduate students from ASU have validated through on-site observations the complex RS data models.

Down To Earth Goals

Although the program relies on space-age technology with its bewildering array of acronyms such as TIMS (Thermal Imaging Mapping Spectrometer) and TTPCA (TargetTransformation Principal Component Analysis), its goals are very down to earth: Harness the technology to solve practical problems and reduce government costs.

Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of how these goals may be achieved involves filing for a stormwater permit. According to the National League of Cities (NLC), the average initial cost of obtaining such a permit from various federal and state agencies in the United States is $600,000. Orr estimates it costs Scottsdale $80,000 per square mile of undeveloped land and more in developed areas. Moreover, municipalities incur costs in subsequent years because they are required to monitor progress based on what they proposed in their applications. Fines for noncompliance can be considerable, too.

Costly Data Collection

Much of the permitting cost involves data collection. Surface classifications such as pavement, rooftop, grass or gravel must be determined. Information about the slope of the land, soil types and other physical aspects of an area also contribute to runoff and are vital to the permit. But on-site inspections by city personnel are enormously time-consuming and expensive. Moreover, inspections are often done by personnel from different departments who do not have access to a common database, driving up costs still further.

Using RS by satellite or airplane, these and many other observations can be made automatically and, with the help of hardware and software being developed in the program, converted to a computer visualization of the earth accurate to within a hundredth of a foot. The software will also allow information to be easily disseminated across all departments.

The new program could develop “almost an instant [stormwater] permit,” says Orr, who estimates Scottsdale might halve the cost of its stormwater permitting using the Advanced Technology Program. (See chart on page 37 for a partial list of applications and savings projected by the city of Scottsdale.)

Scottsdale is able to capitalize on space-age technology because, Orr says, it has a good GIS and a management willing to embrace technology and take risks. “Most decisions involve an area, a location, and we need spatially based software systems,” he says. “The GIS is the common denominator of spatial decisions.”

It is also the link to many other departments. “A GIS must serve all departments effectively to ease decision making,” he notes. “It must also create an electronic audit trail. Elected officials must be able to defend their decisions .”

William White, senior marketing manager at Intergraph, Corp., the Huntsville, Ala., company developing hardware and software for the Advanced Technology Program, also emphasizes the importance of GIS. “GIS is becoming a component of larger information systems, existing tabular information systems, databases, word processing, civil engineering and design application systems,” he says. “Combine all that with RS imaging, and that’s pretty powerful stuff especially since, when we get through we will be able to communicate all that information in simple graphic terms to city councils, planning commissions, citizens and other groups.”

Fortunately, Scottsdale has a history of embracing technology and a cityhall culture that encourages creativity and risk-taking. Scottsdale adopted GIS analysis early on, says White, and immediately saw its benefits. “We have come to view Scottsdale as not in the mold of the typical customer,” he says. “Scottsdale has been willing to invest in technology even when the benefits seemed far off. As a result the city has been able to capitalize on technical developments such as RS as they come along.”

History Of Innovation

A sign on the wall in City Manager Richard Bower’s office sums up the city’s philosophy of encouraging new ideas. It reads, “Risk, Create, Innovate!” Someone has added in parenthesis “or leave.”

Bowers, who sees his role as the “nurturer of champions,” says he has tried to create a “value-centric” not “leader-centric” environment that institutionalizes risk-taking and breaks away from what he calls the “dysfunctional paradigms that have come to government.” The result, he says, has been a “good history of technological innovation.”

When Bowers hired him 2 1/2 years ago, he had no idea that Orr would place the city at the leading edge of a new technology. Orr’s first assignment was to help the city decide whether it should enter into a public-private partnership to build a $30 million to $40 million space-science center. With a background in space technology and military reconnaissance and experience running his own construction company, Orr seemed ideally suited to take on the new job.

Interacting with NASA officials while studying the museum proposal, Orr became immersed in space-driven technology. He soon realized that while the space center proposal should be scrapped, the possibilities for applying space technology in acquiring data for Scottsdale were almost limitless.

Working with Sam Venneri, director of advanced concepts and technology at NASA, Orr put together a full-blown proposal to present to Bowers and NASA Administrator Dan Goldin.

Before doing so, however, Orr asked Philip Christensen, director of the Mars Space Flight Facility and a professor of RS at ASU, to review the proposal and determine its viability.

“We needed technical guidance and judgment calls from an expert,” Orr says. “We are users rather than developers of technology.”

Christensen, an acknowledged expert in RS, had been working with NASA on planetary explorations and had built instruments used on a satellite launch to Mars in 1992. He informed Orr that his proposal was indeed viable. “The same concepts that apply to remote sensing from Mars apply to Scottsdale. Instead of minerals on Mars, it’s asphalt in Scottsdale,” he says. In March 1994, Orr and Venneri got final approval when NASA Administrator Goldin gave them “two thumbs up on the project.”

The project immediately took on global proportions. NASA had launched Mission to Planet Earth to provide integrated measurements of changes in the global climate, hoping to improve weather forecasting and provide valuable information to businesspeople, farmers, foresters, fishermen, land use and coastal planners, educators and the public.

Some of the first global issues selected for study by researchers from the United States and 13 other nations included the effect El Nirio has on weather, the rise in sea levels, the condition of the ozone layer and earth warming. Phase 1 of the mission, now underway, is measuring specific aspects of the earth, such as ozone depletion (with Russia and Japan), ocean circulation and sea height (with France) and the effects of the sun and surface vegetation on the atmosphere (with Italy, Germany, Belgium and France). In 1998, Phase 2 will begin the gathering by earth observing satellites of 24 different earth measurements over 15 years to provide the first long-term, integrated observations of the global environment. Sightings should enable scientists to predict how the earth’s climate will change, rather than just describe its features.

Such long-range perspectives may be beyond the scope of many communities absorbed with more immediate problems, but not that of the residents of Scottsdale. In fact, their request for city officials to look into the future helped fuel interest in developing the Advanced Technology Program.

Since its incorporation in 1951, Scottsdale has grown from a farming cluster of 2,000 people with a downtown nucleus of one square mile, to a city of 165,000 people spread over 185 square miles. Planners fix the city’s maximum population in the 350,000 to 400,000 range. Some urban areas are growing, some are already being redeveloped, and about 60 percent is open space yet to be developed.

“People on Main Street care a lot about the distant future of the community,” Orr says. “They want to preserve areas that are environmentally valuable. He points out that, despite being cost-conscious, residents taxed themselves to purchase land in the McDowell Mountain Preserve to keep it from development.

They also realize, he says, that “we are now in a global economy and a global environment. If global wan. means higher floodwaters, that u important to communities. These are dynamic megatrends within which we need to steward the resources of the community. Technology allows us to do modeling and foresee the implications of long-term decisions and helps us support those decisions.”

An Interactive System

When the Advanced Technology Program is commercialized, other cities will be able to join Scottsdale in modeling more accurately for the future. “You’ll be able to buy components for a data-gathering system just as you buy components for a stereo system as long as a supplier complies with certain standards in the program,” says Intergraphs’s White.

His company’s role is to develop an interactive computer system that allows a user to capture and manipulate data quickly using graphics displayed on a computer screen. The system is interactive because it will respond immediately when a user enters data or asks a question. “We don’t want to develop specialized programs such as a spreadsheet program, for example,” White says. “Lotus already does that and quite well. Buyers of the new system will buy components from multiple vendors, including technical vendors for technical applications. The company will provide spatial data components–GIS, RS, civil engineering, for example and the links to other software and hardware components.

“Whatever system we develop, people will be able to use different program language written at different times in different parts of the world,” he says. “It will merge technical and office automation applications without losing the integrity or precision inherent in the technical data.”

But, while the behind-the-scenes technology is very impressive, Bowers likes to keep things simple. “Laymen will be able to look at pictures and graphics and, by putting in variables [in a computer console], see what the outcome of a decision will be,” he says. “It improves dialogue which, I have found, produces alternate scenarios and, eventually, better decisions for the community.”