PPPM 611/613/617: 2022 Final Project

EarthExplorer is a good place to look for individual aerial photography frames of anywhere in the United States. You can search and download images from a number of USGS aerial photography programs. Elevation data, Landsat data, and other satellite and remote sensing data is also available. Aerial photography in EarthExplorer includes:

• National High Altitude Program (NHAP) Black-and-white and color infrared aerial photographs obtained from an altitude of 40,000 feet over the United States (1980-1989)
• National Aerial Photography Program (NAPP) Black-and-white and color infrared aerial photographs obtained from an altitude of 20,000 feet over the United States that are available as medium or high resolution digital images (1987-2007)
• National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) aerial imagery at a minimum resolution of 1-meter ground sample distance (GSD) for the United States during the agricultural growing season (2003 - present)
• Aerial Photograph Single Frames Coverage is predominantly over the United States and includes portions of Central America and Puerto Rico. Individual photographs vary in date, scale, size, film type, quality, and coverage. While small compared to print aerial photography collections, the coverage is growing as older aerial photography gets scanned and added.
• Digital Orthophoto Quadrangles (DOQs) computer-generated image of an aerial photograph in which the image displacement caused by terrain relief and camera tilt has been removed. The DOQ combines the image characteristics of the original photograph with the georeferenced qualities of a map (1980s - early 2000s).

The Knight Library Aerial Photography Collection has 1,000,000 unique images, primarily paper prints but also original film and digital photographs. Our earliest images are from 1929. The majority of the photographs were taken in the 1930s up to the 2000s. They cover all of Oregon and some surrounding states, especially western Washington. Many of these physical images are irreplaceable and some are in fragile condition which is why the Library mediates access to the physical materials.

Check with your class instructor.  They may have already requested an aerial photography time series of the area your class is studying and provided access to them via Canvas.

If you wish additional aerial photography for your classwork, contact the Aerial Photography Research service.