It’s becoming harder and harder to get a homeowner insurance policy in California. State Farm and Allstate stopped writing new policies, citing wildfire risks. Others are limiting new customers.
And now, several viewers tell San Francisco’s KGO-TV that AAA is not renewing their longtime policies – and it has nothing to do with wildfires.
These homeowners were surprised to find out aircraft and satellites were taking photos over their homes. They were baffled to find out the reasons AAA dropped their coverage – everything from clutter in the yard to draining a swimming pool to save water.
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Insurance companies have access to lots of satellite images but usually they are taken about once a year.
Most urban areas are flown with manned aircraft, 3-6 times a year. You don’t use satellite for this kind of work. Its usually 6-30 cm GSD and often taken in a 5-7 camera system so that you get oblique looks down the sides of houses.
Exactly and yes you can pay for access to that but I have never seen anywhere that has it updated more than once a year. Way too expensive. Some rural areas have hardly any flyover images available at all.
Well you are just… wrong.
I buy from Vexcel, Hexagon, Nearmaps. I’ve commissioned flights for aerial imagery and lidar on the order of thousands of square miles.
Vexcel flies the entire continental US a minimum of 2x per year in their blue sky program. Even semi urban areas are usually getting three times per year or better. At least a leaf on/ leaf off flight. And that’s just one supplier.
Please don’t push ignorance of a thing as a form of information. Your ignorance of a thing is not a form of evidence.
Hello, do you buy this data or commission these flights as part of your job? What are these images useful for? I get the insurance verification, and some other uses like wildfire surveys and stuff but that’s about all I can think of. Road surveys maybe?
Can anybody commission these, in terms of permissions and in terms of cost?
Either way this is super cool info. Thanks for sharing.
I’ve been in the field of remote sensing since around the year 2000. Remote sensing data is used for literally anything you can think of. I started in sonar, but moved on to lidar and imagery (satellite and aerial), and some hyperspectral. If you want to build a highway, you fly lidar. If you want to build a building, you’ll use lidar. If you want to know where flooding will happen, guess what? Lidar. Plant health? Lidar or imagery, or hyperspec. Land cover? Lidar or imagery.
I’ve worked at pretty much every position in the stack, from field operator to senior scientist. My work these days focuses mostly on wildfire risk, carbon forestry, land cover, and outdoor water use.
Edit: And as far as buying data? Sure. No problem. But its not cheap. I got a quote for a client two weeks ago that was a 240 acre site and it was going to cost ~20k. This was for a very high resolution dataset, with a fair amount of processing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_sensing
Cool thanks for sharing that information. I’m so sorry I said something that may not be accurate in your opinion or fact. I’ll leave the internet now forever.
The news video clip in the article says they flew a freaking drone over his house… More than a little dystopian.