MISSING CLIMBER: Maroon Bells, Bells traverse, Pyramid

[kmoore]

There is an interesting X I tagged in quadrant fd9x2cy1o of Tomnod.

[BillMiddlebrook]

The resolution on Tomnod is so low that I can't see enough detail to spend time looking through the images. Is the resolution higher if you sign up on their site?

[thurs]

The resolution on Tomnod is so low that I can't see enough detail to spend time looking through the images. Is the resolution higher if you sign up on their site?

Nope. The imagery is the same whether you are logged in or not. Unfortunately Tomnod's primary strength is in disaster recovery and identification efforts, on a slightly larger scale than human-sized. I appreciate their efforts, however, and all those participating in this Tomnod campaign.

[AyeYo]

There is an interesting X I tagged in quadrant fd9x2cy1o of Tomnod.

How do you jump to that area? I don't see a search function and the quadrant field doesn't seem to allow for manual input (at least not without an account).

[thurs]

There is an interesting X I tagged in quadrant fd9x2cy1o of Tomnod.

How do you jump to that area? I don't see a search function and the quadrant field doesn't seem to allow for manual input (at least not without an account).

You can just put it in the URL.

http://www.tomnod.com/campaign/colorado ... /fd9x2cy1o" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[acidchylde]

The resolution on Tomnod is so low that I can't see enough detail to spend time looking through the images. Is the resolution higher if you sign up on their site?

That's actually pretty high resolution imagery for satellite - sub-meter resolution in fact. As I mentioned earlier, the problem is the size of the target, and most people don't have a good idea of what they're looking for at the start. Especially if you get dropped in the middle of a rock field, solid forest, or open water as a starting view; it's hard to establish a scale (yes, there's a bar at the bottom of the image) to calibrate your eye/mind. I note there are no examples on this campaign yet, which there usually are to give you an idea of what something being sought for tagging is going to look like.

http://www.tomnod.com/campaign/colorado ... /fc6x1vy2k" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; should contain a trailhead along side the road with a few cars and a bus visible. I found this by following a hiking trail down from where I randomly ran across it moving around from the point it started me at.

http://www.tomnod.com/campaign/colorado ... /fc6x1jy29" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; with the panel to the north should contain a beach area with a LOT of people in it. I think this is the end of the road/lake area? More parking and turn around are visible north and east. Yes, having just compared to Google this is the parking area at Maroon Lake. Unfortunately their (aerial I'm pretty sure) imagery was shot in winter, so while you can probably see it's higher resolution there aren't a lot (any?) people or vehicles around for comparison.

So from those two examples you can see what a person is going to look like, and even how hard a tent at half the size of a car is going to be to spot. That's an easy target area so imagine one of those people, or even the whole crowd, standing in a rock field or worse under tree canopy. As thurs said, it's typically larger targets being sought. While a person is possible, and more so under some circumstances than others, in this case it's less than ideal.

[BillMiddlebrook]

I understand it's fairly high-res for satellite imagery but it's still too low-res for a search like this, IMO. Now, if it had resolution as good as what's available in Google Earth, for that location, it would certainly be more useful. The current images used in GE were taken with snow coverage but you can see some really good detail.

Either way, the high-relief areas are mostly distorted. Bummer.

[polar]

I agree, the satellite images available on Tomnod is just not in a high enough resolution to help in the search for a person. A quick browse on their forum seems to indicate that the capability for higher resolution images is there, but only to military or special purposes, not to the general public. Considering a few days ago I was looking at satellite images that are three days old (compare to a couple of months on Google Earth?), I thought it's pretty impressive. But ultimately, it's maybe useful for a disaster when you're looking at buildings and vehicles, but for a missing person, it's nearly impossible spot anything useful.

[acidchylde]

Without getting too far off topic here, or at least trying to keep it short...

Military satellite capabilities are classified, so who knows. Commercial sat specs are published information. There were government restrictions on what they could sell/disseminate to the public, but those restrictions were relaxed (at least somewhat) in 2014. Keeping it simple, there are two basic sensor resolutions to be aware of - panchromatic (black and white), and multispectral (natural color). Panchromatic is almost always higher than multispectral, but there's a process that uses panchromatic to sharpen the multispectral (if you have ever played with LAB color in an image editor for photographs that's similar). Looking at the current top two DG sats, Worldview 2 and 3, 2 has a 0.46m panchromatic max resolution (ie one pixel is 0.46m on the ground) and 1.84m multispectral. Worldview 3 gets panchromatic to 0.31m and 1.24m multispectral. Tomnod's FAQ indicates they're using 50cm imagery, so basically one pixel is about 18 inches of ground. That's as good as it gets, there's no higher resolution available from the sensor just for certain users. That said, I don't know the exact process and resolutions displayed, because Tomnod describes their process as people look at images, if they (or enough of them) flag something a tech looks at it, and if the tech still thinks it's something another tech looks at it in original resolution files. BTW I see links to source files in the Tomnod forums if you want to go down that rabbit hole - it's not as simple as opening it up in a picture viewer.

Most of what you see on Google when zoomed in that far isn't sat imagery, it's aerial - as in flown by a plane. There's a lot less atmosphere between the ground and a plane than the ground and a satellite. But the plane missions have to be planned and flown and can only cover smaller areas (the image swath on one of those sats is 16km). So the revisit time can be months or even years compared to days for a satellite. Some flown imagery is even lower than the sat imagery mentioned above (for instance, NAIP was 1m up until the last year or two when they moved toward sub-meter). I don't spend a lot of time with Earth, but I do know it's fairly difficult to pin down specifics about a particular image you're looking at because Google patches a lot of different data sources together - and not always the same date depending on what scale you're zoomed to, even in the same place. I'm sure you've seen imagery seams all over the place in Google. They're getting so patchwork and detailed now they're almost everywhere.

There's your very (over) simplified tech lesson for the day. I agree that it's too low of a resolution to reliably search for an individual person, particularly given the terrain. It's still possible to find signs of a person or things like a slide that might warrant more investigation or focus a search. But I think drones will be there long before non-military satellites will. I looked up one of the local drone places who has done some disaster imagery missions but their specs indicated their tested operational ceiling was 12k. I'm not personally up enough on drones yet to know if there are (commercial) systems out there yet that might be usable in this terrain/climate/location for this purpose.

[Sabelmom]

Dear 14ers.com,
We are hoping we might enlist your support and help searching photos with us to help find David Cook - the hiker that went missing on 9/19 or 9/20.

Thank you to all who worked on getting the photos loaded!

Please read the instructions carefully and thank you for your help in advance!
Please note: the images were loaded as received, they are in various orders and we do not have location coordinates on them. We strongly recommend using a desktop to review these.

Step 1 - Click on the link:
https://tasks.crowdflower.com/assignmen ... ernal=true

Sign up or log in through FaceBook
If you sign up or log in through Facebook, you will have to go to your email account to verify. (it might even look blank after you enter in log in and password information - so go to email to check)
Once you click on verify, it takes you to a weird page that is not our page to work on. Close that page or window and then click on link again and log in and you'll be on the find the missing hiker page after you accept the terms and conditions.

Step 2 - Now that you are on the missing hiker page, you might see a clock of 60 minutes on the top right-hand side counting down, it gives you 60 minutes to review each page. Each page contains 20 images and you will click a button on each image depending on what you see.
For a good example of what someone hiking in a photo looks like, click on this link (thanks for sharing this info Doug Shaw)
http://www.14ers.com/forum/viewtopic.ph ... 36#p619693

Step 3 - you might see verbiage about earning money or getting paid - please disregard. The company crowd flower does pay people for searches, but not for this group of volunteers to help find Dave.
(We are paying them to have more professional folks look - just fyi)

Tips: you can use the "open full-size image" button under the photo or right-click and select "save the image" on your computer to enlarge it if needed.
Here's the Link again:
https://tasks.crowdflower.com/assignmen ... ernal=true

If you have questions or need help, please reply and thank you so much!

[ACinCO]

Just thought I'd link this up in case anyone is here but not on the FB page. There are a few photos on the page that have been identified as areas of interest, and it appears that some users (drone pilots etc) are looking for additional information about those areas. Obviously some good expertise here so just thought I'd pass that along; here's the FB page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1811039525846692/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Sabelmom]

Update 10/10: Search and Rescue reviewed the photo that Steve Cook surfaced. (and all other top leads) This area is known as the Garbage Chute and is very common to have skid marks as everything falls down that path. The entire area was very closely searched both on foot and via air by SAR. In addition, we had a photo expert review this image and the report was aligned with SAR belief, strange rock formation.

Informal searches are still occurring on a daily basis. The Sheriff's office is more than willing to continue to research anomalies that we find in photos. Our goal is to gather all photos and information from all of you and summarize and send the top leads to SAR for follow up. We want to be respectful of helping and do not want to overwhelm the Sheriff's department.

We have additional photos arriving tonight and will post as soon as possible and ask for your help and thank you all in advance for your time! Please research the photos until Wednesday night as we will put the summary together for SAR first thing Thursday morning.
Thank you all again!