Haiti Earthquake Mapping Support

The Center for Interdisciplinary Geospatial Information Technologies at Delta State University was informally asked by a Federal responder to Haiti to create USNG/MGRS polygons for Haiti. Our first run will be 1,000-m polygons for the entire country followed by 100-m polygons for Port-au-Prince extending to an area 20km to the east and 20km to the south. These data may be used by FEMA USAR assets deployed earlier today as they support the georeferencing policy they use (http://www.uscg.mil/hq/cg5/cg534/nsarc/Georeferencing_info.asp). When possible, we strongly suggest that any map products created in support of Haiti use both a lat/long graticule and USNG/MGRS reference lines (be aware of the zone junction and contact us if you need help with putting into a map) in accordance with the georeferencing matrix - this will make your products useful to those with boots on ground. We will post all USNG/MGRS data for use as attributed polygons to http://mississippi.deltastate.edu/data/haiti as it comes available. We are also going to attempt a quick first run at producing 8.5 x 11" 1:25,000 map books for the Port-au-Prince area (examples at http://mississippi.deltastate.edu/data/USNG_Atlases/) using whatever vector data products we can lay hands on that might be useful. Note that this is NOT a formally tasked mission to us but rather a request through an informal network and that our suggestion for using USNG/MGRS is based on prior experiences. USNG/MGRS data created and provided with financial support of USGS (THANK-YOU!!!).