Home > New high-resolution Northwest Arkansas aerial imagery is now available in Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth.
Google Earth
Color 1 foot pixel resolution aerial imagery taken in 2004 for all of Washington and Benton Counties are now featured in Google Earth. A sample of this imagery is shown below.
Goggle Earth is a plug-in that runs on Windows 2000, XP or Mac OS X computers. It can be downloaded for free at http://www.earth.google.com . Enter an address anywhere in Washington or Benton counties and the software will “fly” to that location. The buttons at the bottom of the view allow you to zoom in and out, rotate, add a placemark, etc.
The Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission coordinated the aerial photography project in conjunction with the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department, the University of Arkansas and virtually every government entity in Benton and Washington counties. Public utility companies and various federal agencies also cooperated in the process.
Click here for a press release on the project.
Microsoft Virtual Earth
“Oblique” color photographs taken in 2005 for Fayetteville and Springdale are now available at the Microsoft Virtual Earth website http://local.live.com. Oblique photographs are taken from an airplane at different angles so that they can provide better detail about objects on the ground. An example of the imagery is shown below:
When you access the site you will need to first zoom to a location in either Fayetteville or Springdale. If you are in an area where the high resolution oblique imagery is available you will see a notice “There is ‘Bird’s Eye imagery available for this location” as in the example below:
When you view the oblique imagery you can see the same location from different directions by clicking on the directional arrows at the top left of the viewer. The next two images illustrate the same location viewed from different cardinal directions (E and W).
Further details on the 2005 Northwest Arkansas image acquisition project will be provided shortly.
Note: The Benton and Washington County Assessors and Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission are planning a press release on the new oblique imagery. As soon as it is available we
will provide a link here.
