LANGLEY AIR FORCE BASE, Virginia –
A hurricane is coming.
It’s not here yet, but it will be soon. The weatherman is predicting so many inches of rain and so many feet of storm surge. Langley is going to be affected, but how?
Actually, Patti McSherry, 1st Fighter Wing Geospatial Information OIC, can tell you exactly how Langley will be affected thanks to GeoBase, a computer mapping system similar to the Internet’s MapQuest.
“It started with the idea of Common Installation Picture,” Ms. McSherry said. “’One Base, One Map.’ Commanders on this base shouldn’t be looking at different maps when making command and control decisions. So we survey every street, sidewalk and house so when you tell someone what coordinate something is, it’s the same place.”
But, Ms. McSherry asked, why stop there?
More information was added to the map, including building elevations, a feature with a potentially life-saving result.
“This year we did over 800 elevations at the front door,” Ms. McSherry said. “We put the elevations in the database and determined the mean high water, mean low water and the flood levels for Langley.”
Ms. McSherry said with that information, GeoBase can predict flooding on Langley based on whatever factors she wants to input into the database.
“This feature was created for Hurricane Wilma,” she explained. “It wasn’t in place in time for Isabel. I can predict any number of days out, up to 20 scenarios at a time so the wing commander can make decisions.”
But GeoBase can offer more than emergency preparedness, and anyone with access to the network can access it through the Langley Web site.
GeoBase can pinpoint every water main, electrical line, sewer pipe, boat ramp, dining hall, static display, putting green and other base features with a mouse click.
“It’s a vast amount of data,” Ms. McSherry said. “But everything classified is on the SIPRNET with security controlled at GeoBase.”
The location of every emergency defibrillator scattered across base is one of the many features found on GeoBase.
“It’s very important we know the base locations and the PAD locations in relation to each other,” said Senior Master Sgt. John Elder, 1st Medical Support Squadron medical logistics superintendent. “We get questions fairly often from different units on base asking, ‘where is the closest defibrillator to our building?’ I can answer that question in just a few moments with the products from GeoBase. We don’t plan on stopping with defibrillators. I’ll provide the GeoBase office with the locations of all medical facilities on base, so we’ll have a good map of those. The possibilities are limitless.”
So limitless, in fact, that 15 Air Force bases in the U.S. and about 10 bases overseas are using GeoBase. Janel Keen, Air Combat Command GeoBase Office, said the program is being used in places like Baghdad and Balad AB, Iraq.
“Our goal is to provide as much mapping information as quickly as possible to help decision-makers save lives,” she said.
Ms. Keen said the program has many battlefield applications. For instance, if Balad AB were attacked, commanders at every level would use GeoBase maps to plan a counterattack and be able to direct forces toward or away from the hot zones.
“A commander can look at the same information as the person physically in the AOR,” she said.
Ms. McSherry said more applications are on the way.
“Surveying has always been out there, but what you do with it has grown by leaps and bounds,” she said. “The future of GeoBase is limited only by one’s imagination.”
GeoBase can be accessed through the 1st CES portion of the Langley Web site.