GeoWorld

NEWSLINK Virginia Tech Puts GIS into Play during Football Games Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) now uses a GIS application to allow police and emergency responders to track and view security and safety activities during home football games. The application includes layers for incidents, rescue-squad and police resources, seating locations, and interior-space floor plans—all overlaid atop an aerial view of the stadium and surrounding areas. Data are stored in the university's enterprise GIS and can later be used to analyze university response and help plan for future events at Virginia Tech— famous for its football fanaticism and prodigies (such as NFL quarterback Michael Vick) as well as a 2007 one-man shooting spree that left 32 dead and 25 wounded across campus. "As each game is unique, the application provides a picture of events as they happen, giving respond- ers the information they need to identify problem areas and strategically redeploy assets in response to changing circumstances," said Seth Peery, senior architect for enterprise GIS and one of the applica- tion's developers. Survey Project Focuses on Remnants of Manmade D-Day Harbors Two mobile, artificial harbors—each consisting of 600,000 tons of concrete with 33 jetties and 10 miles of floating roadways—were towed across the English Channel after the 1944 D-Day invasion of Normandy. The British- designed and -built harbors, known as "Mulberries," played a key role in supplying the Allies fighting to wrest France from Nazi control. Some consider the Mulberries the greatest engineering achievement of World War II, but, like many manmade mar- vels, they succumbed to the elements. Now, with the aid of new hydrography software and survey techniques, harbor remnants are being surveyed as part of a modern archaeol- ogy mission involving multiple organizations. The United Kingdom Hydrographic Office led an alliance of hydrographic organizations in fall 2011 in a two-week survey of the remains of "Mulberry B," the harbor oper- ated by the British off Normandy's Gold Beach. The project also included some survey work on "Mulberry A" remains, located off of Omaha Beach. (Mulberry A, operated by the United States after the Normandy landing, was surveyed in part in 2002 by the U.S. Naval Historical Center, now known as the Naval History and Heritage Command.) The survey used a multi-beam echo sounder to record underwater remains of the harbors and other debris located in the area. Pelydryn, a U.K.-based LIDAR company, A U.S. Navy file photo shows vehicles departing an artificial harbor, or "Mulberry," heading for the Normandy shore after the D-Day invasion of 1944. A new survey effort seeks to document the remnants of the Mulberries. offered use of a LIDAR-equipped plane for the survey, and French university ENSTA Bretagne offered a boat- mounted terrestrial scanning laser. Geospatial software developer CARIS, meanwhile, supplied bathymetric pro- cessing software (products known as HIPS and SIPS) as well as analysis and compilation software (CARIS' BASE Editor) and two computers to help manage the data gleaned during the survey. 8 GEO W ORLD / N O VEMBE R 2O11 Government Special Issue U.S. NAVY

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