By Hugh Shipman, Washington Department of Ecology
The Department of Ecology recently updated its popular shoreline photo website, improving access to multiple series of oblique aerial photos of Washington’s coast. These photos are a key element of Ecology’s Coastal Atlas and are a great complement to the vertical imagery readily available on Google and Bing’s mapping sites.
Screenshot of the Ecology’s Coastal Atlas. Click here to follow link
The oblique perspective is intuitive and easily understood by the general public. In addition, the high resolution of the images provides information not readily seen in other datasets. The discrete images are easy to download and are readily included in emails, documents, and presentations.
The photos offer seamless coverage of Washington’s entire marine shoreline and the recent series also include the Columbia River and many of Washington’s larger lakes. The photo viewer allows easy comparisons between different time periods. With financial support from NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management, the most recent photos were completed in 2016-2017, but the site also provides access to aerials from 1976-1977, 1992-1994, 2000-2002, and 2006-2007. The photo viewer is integrated with our Coastal Atlas, allowing access to many other types of information along with the photos.
Screenshot of the Shoreline Photo Viewer. Click here to follow link.
Screenshot of the Shoreline Photo Viewer. Click here to follow link.
As part of this project, we completed a report (link to guidance) that captures the history and many uses of the photos – including information from CHRN members. Among other important uses, we found that these photos can be valuable for evaluating and communicating coastal hazards. The oblique images are particularly useful for looking at steep slopes that are typically hard to discern in conventional vertical imagery. They’ve been used for mapping bluff geology, identifying landslides and erosion patterns, and evaluating at-risk structures and stabilization measures. The photos would be a very useful baseline following a major disaster, whether it be a major coastal storm, a tsunami, an earthquake, or a wet winter with abundant landsliding.
