VerticalGeo

VerticalGeo deployed to McChord Field, Washington, from July 16-30 to provide GeoIntegration support to Air Mobility Rodeo 2011. We stood up a web-based ArcGIS Server Flex viewer to help visualize all the ground and flying event competitions at Rodeo.

On the first day of the flying portion of the competition thunderstorms moved into the flying routes and drop zone areas and impacted the competition.  Most of the flights were postponed on Monday morning and everything slipped to Monday afternoon.  Here is a picture of the imagery basemap with a real-time NextRad weather feed integrated with the 5 different flying routes the aircraft were flying on Monday and drop zones overlaid on top of the map:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The flying competition was planned to depart McChord Field, Washington (near Tacoma), cross over the Cascades, descend over central and eastern Washington, and perform airdrops at several locations.  The weather over the Cascades impacted the competition because the aircraft could not get low enough to cancel their IFR clearance and Seattle center did not have the manpower to vector 30 aircraft around the weather, each 5 minutes in trail.  The weather cleared up the rest of the week and the flying schedule returned to on-time.  Here is what the weather looked like over Brahma Drop Zone in central Washington at the same time: