Around the World in One Night:
NORAD Tracks Santa
By Luis J. Olivieri |
 |
For many years, I wondered how Santa managed to fly on Christmas Eve without a single accident. First, I thought he had Elf Fly Assistance but, with all the planning, I knew the elves were busy with other chores. A few years ago, I got the answer to my question in a scientific magazine in the area of remote sensing and GIS.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a United States and Canadian organization is charged with the missions of aerospace warning and aerospace control for North America. Aerospace warning includes the monitoring of man-made objects in space, and the detection, validation, and warning of attacks against North America whether by aircrafts, missiles, or space vehicles, through mutual support arrangements with other commands.
Well guess what? For the last 50 years, NORAD has been tracking Santa during his Christmas Eve flight. In the early days, before the Internet or the web, NORAD had volunteers who continuously checked the radar and provided updates to people who called for information.
Today, NORAD has created an interface between their radar system, satellites, Santa Cams, fighter jets and Google Earth to provide real-time update on the location of Santa during his famous Christmas Eve flight. The technology behind this interface is geographic information system (GIS). Santa is tracked with a radar system, which determines his location. This location is then fed into a GIS and this GIS interact with Google Earth to provide a really nice map of his actual location, in real-time.
When my kids where kids (they are not kids anymore), we sat on front of our computer to see how Santa was doing. The interface since that time has evolved into a piece of art with really nice graphics.
For more information about NORAD Tacks Santa, including detailed information on “How we track Santa” or to actually track Santa during his Christmas Eve flight, please visit http://www.noradsanta.org/en/index.html. The site has a nice video to demonstrate how it works.
If you want to learn about the technologies of remote sensing, geographic information system (GIS) and global positioning system (GPS), visit our page at http://atlantic.edu/gis
For information about Geographic Information Systems (GIS) at Atlantic Cape Community College please, visit http://atlantic.edu/gis