AIRBORNE INFRARED THERMOGRAPHY FOR ENVIRONMENTAL AND FACILITY MANAGEMENT OF THE ARMY NATIONAL GUARD TRAINING FACILITIES

With all the emphases today on energy conservation and the impact of human activities on the environment, the need for efficient tools and procedures for monitoring such impacts becomes more important than ever. The progress in technologies of the thermal sensing scored tremendous advancements in the last decade and utilizing thermal surveys is proving to be one of the highest payoffs in facilities management. Most recent digital thermal sensors make it possible to detect the faintest entrapped moisture on a flat built-up roof or detect heat loss from walls in residential and industrial building structures. Trapped moisture destroys insulation and causes heat loss from the structure it is protecting. In addition, thermal surveys prove to be valuable in detecting and understanding different behaviors of pervious and impervious soil and other land covers such as wet lands and water ways. Fugro EarthData was tasked by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to utilize aerial thermal sensors to capture high quality geo-referenced thermal digital imagery over five Army National Guard facilities. The five sites were flown from different altitudes using state of the art thermal imager FLIR SC8000 and resulted in different ground sampling distance (GSD) for each of the five sites determine the best GSD for various applications. All airborne data was controlled by a GPS-supported flight management system for the purposes of accurate execution of data acquisition. The resulting product is high quality rectified and geo-referenced thermal imagery that is fully compliant with the ASPRS accuracy standard. Field temperature measurements were also compiled to aid the interpretation.