PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. — A team that developed a system that allows users at North American Aerospace Command and U.S. Northern Command to quickly and easily access detailed geospatial data has been selected to receive the 2007 United States Geospatial Foundation's achievement award in the military category.
The four members of the Space and Naval Warfare Center C4I Engineering Support Team – Dave McKinley, Chris Mayfield, Dave Gokey and Gary Koch – spent about a year creating the Situational Awareness Geospatial Enterprise system.
Project manager McKinley compared SAGE to "Google Earth on steroids."
"Geospatial data provides information about the physical environment that we all live in," he said. "It's information about buildings, infrastructure – where the police stations are, where the hospitals are, and where certain businesses are."
Showing particular categories of locations on demand is what makes SAGE so powerful, and so useful for NORAD and USNORTHCOM.
"If there's a pandemic influenza threat in, let's say, the state of Washington, we can go into the database and find out where all the chicken farms are, where all the turkey farms are," McKinley said. "If you're in the middle of Phoenix, and you want to know where every hospital within 10 miles is, then you can query for that specifically. Or, you can say, 'Give me the closest 20 hospitals,' and it will give you that data."
The data SAGE displays was already available via an existing system, but accessing it was difficult, time-consuming and required extensive training, according to McKinley. The SAGE team's goal was to make the data easily accessible to individual users after only a few minutes of training.
"It's not very hard to learn; it's very intuitive," McKinley said.
Some other combatant commands have already expressed interest in using the SAGE system.
Although SAGE isn't yet in widespread use at NORAD and USNORTHCOM, the team met its goal of fielding the system on a limited basis in August, before the most severe part of the hurricane season traditionally begins. Several NORAD and USNORTHCOM personnel from directorates including Operations, Logistics, Intelligence and the Surgeon General are using SAGE, and even more people will use it during the commands' participation in exercise Vigilant Shield '08 this week.
"We're using the exercise to evaluate it so we can provide feedback, we can make changes, we can make it more usable to the user," McKinley said.
The biggest benefit SAGE provides to NORAD and USNORTHCOM personnel, McKinley said, is allowing them to make better-informed decisions.
"Let's just take, for example, there's a radiological detonation in Phoenix," McKinley said. "Some entity within the federal government will build what's called a plume model that will show the dispersal area of this radiological event. Within the (geospatial information system) environment, you can go in there and you can see a lot of information about what is affected by the dispersal of that radiological event.
"So, within that plume, you can see the population based on the 2004 census data, you can look at all the critical infrastructure that might be affected ... whether it's a power station, ... a hospital (or) the number of police stations."
The data SAGE displays is called the Homeland Security Infrastructure Program and is provided by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. It's the same data used by all federal government agencies to identify infrastructure across the nation, and it's updated every six months, McKinley said.
NORAD is the bi-national Canadian and American command that is responsible for the air defense of North America and maritime warning. USNORTHCOM is the unified combatant command responsible for defending the homeland and providing defense support of civil authorities.