Data Dissemination Team

Published Feb. 13, 2013

Background and Description

The Army Geospatial Center’s (AGC) Data Dissemination Team (DDT) was established in 2004 as the Source Acquisition Team (SAT) to provide image and map support to the Army community. The name was changed in 2009 to more accurately reflect the mission of the team. The DDT’s mission is two-fold. First, to maintain and disseminate AGC produced image and map products such as Urban Tactical Planners (UTPs), GeoPDF products, Buckeye LIDAR, imagery and imagery products, and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) data, to fielded U.S. Army topographic systems and other Army customers through our Common Map Background (CMB) program.

The DDT’s second mission is to produce orthorectified image bases, utilizing both commercial and National Technical Means (NTM) sources, to support the requirements of the Urban Tactical Planner (UTP) program.

Key Capabilities

The DDT is responsible for the dissemination of AGC data as well as NGA map and image data through the CMB program. AGC products such as UTPs, Buckeye LIDAR, imagery, and imagery products, Engineering Route Studies (ERSs), and GeoPDF products are also available for dissemination through CMB. In conjunction with the CMB program, the DDT has the ability to reformat and provide map data for display on the Defense Advanced Global Positioning System Receiver (DAGR) and Garmin GPS units. These products can be disseminated simultaneously with a CMB data request or downloaded from the AGC’s website. Data is available for over a dozen countries, including a complete dataset of Afghanistan, downloaded to a micro-SD card for use on the Garmin.

In addition, the AGC has ingested all formats of NGA data into the CMB database to include CADRG, ADRG, CIB, DTED, SRTM, and shaded relief products produced from the DTED and SRTM data. IRS NaturalVue data, Military Installation Maps, and USGS DOQQ’s have also been incorporated into the CMB data library. Data is extracted using the data export tool by geographic footprint, country boundary, or by a buffer around a road, city, river, etc.

The DDT has produced hundreds of image-based products, filling a niche that was needed to support the Warfighter and the Army. There are over 2,000 cities on the current UTP requirements list. The goal is to produce image bases of all cities listed on the requirements list by merging elevation information with imagery to produce both an orthophoto product and a Terra-Explorer fly-through. These UTP fly-throughs depict not only the urban area, but the outlying terrain as well. If available, the analyst will use commercial imagery such as Quickbird, WorldView, or Ikonos as the base image for the UTP. If commercial imagery does not exist for their particular area of interest, the analyst will download NTM imagery to produce high-resolution orthophoto image bases and subsequently declassify the output product to LIMDIS by using an Image Derived Product (IDP) process. These final mosaicked image bases are provided to the Urban team for inclusion in the UTP product.

Current Status

The DDT CMB analysts fill requests for numerous Army customers, including U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ offices, INSCOM, JFCOM, SOUTHCOM, CENTCOM, Army terrain teams and topographic units in preparation for deployment. These requests included city and/or country datasets-up to entire Army AORs, and are distributed on CD, DVD or Firewire drive. The CMB program has satisfied over 900 requests in the last year alone, with over 395 terabytes of data delivered to the Warfighter.

In 2011, the Warfighter Geospatial Support Directorate launched CMB Online-a new method for researching and ordering CMB data. CMB Online is a web-based application that allows the customer to discover AGC data sources and place an order to have them delivered to you via DVD or hard drive, or placement of a compressed version of the data on an FTP site for download.

Currently, the DDT has hundreds of UTP’s posted on AGC’s SIPRnet, PKI, and JWICs websites. All UTPs can be requested through CMB.

DDT has developed, and is now disseminating through CMB, an Afghanistan "Gold Brick", containing the most current data available of Afghanistan. The data is contained on two drives, and is formatted for ease of use for the Warfighter, with a plug-and-play design in mind. The Gold Brick will be disseminated quarterly to our customers, and includes Buckeye, UTP’s, ERS’s, WRDG’s and NGA data, as well as other datasets.

Point of Contact

Data Dissemination Team: DLL-AGC-cmb@usace.army.mil
Commercial (703) 428-7889, DSN 364-7889