And the winner is…The Rakaia River in New Zealand!
The Rakaia River is in the Canterbury Plains in New Zealand’s South Island. It is one of the largest braided rivers in New Zealand. The river has a mean flow of 203 cubic meters per second and a mean annual seven-day low flow of 87 cubic meters per second. It rises in the Southern Alps, travelling 150 kilometers in a generally easterly or southeasterly direction before entering the Pacific Ocean 50 kilometers south of Christchurch. For much of its journey, the river is a braided river, running through a wide shingle bed. Close to Mount Hutt, however, it is briefly confined to a narrow canyon known as the Rakaia Gorge.
In the 1850s, European settlers named it the Cholmondeley River, but this name lapsed into disuse. The Rakaia River is bridged in two places. The busiest crossing is at the small town of Rakaia, 20 kilometers from the river mouth, where State Highway 1 and the South Island Main Trunk Railway cross the river using separate bridges. These two bridges are New Zealand’s longest road and rail bridges respectively, approximately 1.75 km long. A second bridge, much shorter and less used, spans the Rakaia Gorge.The Rakaia River is a celebrated Chinook salmon fishery. Bird species known to be found in the Rakaia riverbed are Wrybill, Black fronted Tern and Banded Dotterel.
As an industry leader in commercial satellite imagery, DigitalGlobe is pleased to announce our end-of-the-year top satellite image contest. Our satellite constellation has been busy traveling the globe and capturing incredible imagery, from natural disasters to natural wonders. We’ve selected our favorite 20 images from 2011 and need your help voting on the image you believe is the most aesthetically pleasing and/or astounding.
To vote, simply go to DigitalGlobe’s Facebook page and under albums select Top Image Contest. You can “like” as many images as you want, but only the five images with the most likes will make it to the final round. The first round of voting will end on December 31, 2011.
On January 2, 2012, we will announce the five images with the overall most “likes” and you will be able to vote on your favorite image via a Facebook poll.
We will announce the winning image of 2011 on January 11, 2012.
Please note our Top Image Contest album is also located on Flickr for easy viewing; however please make sure you vote for your favorite on Facebook.
Who do you think deserves the Top Image of the Year title? We want you to be the judge!
Last Tuesday, one of our analysts in the DigitalGlobe Analysis Center made an impressive discovery –finding the first Chinese aircraft carrier (known as the Varyag or the Shi Lang) underway in the middle of the Yellow Sea during its second sea trial , in the midst of fairly heavy cloud cover of one of our QuickBird satellite images. Since we (and many others around the world) have been interested and watching the ship during its nearly decade-long refurbishment, we knew we’d found the Varyag. Knowing the strategic significance of the ship, we were certain that people around the world would be very interested in seeing this historic image of the Varyag underway. By now, you have surely seen our imagery and story in the news over the past week (in AP, MSNBC, Nightly News, and countless other outlets).
I’m proud of our discovery and imagery for a number of reasons. It really is reflective of what the Analysis Center has been involved in throughout 2011. We’re monitoring issues literally around the world that matter to people on a global scale (just think of the countless events associated in Egypt, Yemen, Syria and many other countries in the “Arab Spring,” the aftermath of the Japanese tsunami, dramatic flooding in the Midwest, fires in the Southwest and so many other notable events this year). My team continually employs DigitalGlobe’s core assets—our satellites, our ground architecture and powerful web infrastructure to help explain what happened and why it matters. The Varyag is just one small extension of those attributes – just one event of the dynamic world that we’ve kept track of during 2011. The Varyag find also serves as a tribute to the analysts who are hard at work in our Analysis Center. As I told Alan Boyle with MSNBC, despite our powerful technological advancements that we use every day, the ship was identified using a combination of our satellite imagery open-source material on the internet, and geography; however, at the end of the day, it still comes down to a person and in our case—analysts.
To help me make my point, take a look at this first image of the cloud cover over the Yellow Sea on December 8 (when the first satellite in our constellation, QuickBird, snapped this shot). See if you can see the Varyag?
Don’t beat yourself up! – it’s tough to find. But with a careful search, here it is:
