North West Geomatics Ltd. and Airborne Imaging announced that they have executed a Letter of Intent to combine their existing LiDAR library data in western Canada and to begin joint LiDAR collection for areas not yet acquired. The immediate goal is to complete LiDAR acquisition for substantially all of the province of Alberta, NE British Columbia and portions of southern Saskatchewan.
The entire program will result in the creation of a data library in excess of 700,000 square kilometers of high accuracy LiDAR data. Existing library data is currently being loaded into the Valtus distribution system and will be available commencing October 1, 2007. New areas of coverage are being progressively made available as the data is collected and processed. It is expected that new collection will run into 2008 to complete the entire area required.
Priority collection areas have been selected in conjunction with a number of oil and gas industry partners who have pre-subscribed to the program. These areas will be collected and delivered first and cover in excess of 500,000 square kilometers. Subject to weather, the complete acquisition of these regions is expected in 2007. The balance of the entire program will be completed in 2008 if necessary.
In making this announcement, North West Vice President, Tim Crago stated "We are very pleased to be partnering with Airborne Imaging on this LiDAR program. Airborne brings a substantial existing library of LiDAR data and when combined with North West’s library, it totals in excess of 300,000 sq km. already collected and ready for distribution. And their collection assets of two Optech sensors nicely compliments North West’s collection assets to significantly enhance future acquisition activities.
Owen Stephenson, Airborne’s President and General Manager, commented, ” We are excited about combining our resources with Northwest to complete this significant initiative. A variety of industries in Western Canada will benefit from an accurate, uniform and complete dataset with coverage over large areas of immediate interest to our clients. We are also pleased to be able to offer our products through the Valtus web based delivery system which will make our data more readily available to existing and future customers. We are optimistic that the widespread acceptance of LiDAR mapping products will support this program, which will result in the largest contiguous block of high quality elevation data in existence anywhere in the world.
Source: North West Geomatics
