Customer Reviews

Aerial View of New York & Pennsylvania: A Side-Looking Airborne Radar (SLAR) Image

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This radar image looks like a large black and white photograph taken from space. It shows the landforms with great clarity and high resolution (30 meters). The side-lighting effect of the radar image provides sharp views of such smaller landscape features as drumlins, local drainages, and individual mountain peaks, as well as dramatic displays of the Appalacian fold belt, the Catskills, and the Adirondack Mountains. It has much better resolution than a satellite image because it was taken from an airplane and much closer to Earth.

The image is printed on heavy paper that measures 28 x 32 inches. The scale is 1:1,000,000 or 1 mm = 1 km (about 16 miles per inch). The physiography is shown to stunning effect by the 3D effect of radar imaging. An index map printed in the margin identifies the 20 major and minor physiographic provinces of the region. All are recognized easily. An accompanying text describes how the geology-bedrock, faults, glacial scouring, and glacial deposits- shapes the landforms. Landforms offshore are obscured by the sea, but are described briefly in the text because they are an important part of the physiographic story.