The balloon module of the Instrument will transform pre- and post- disaster management. After a disaster, the Instrument's balloon units can launch where planes cannot take off, where drones cannot find fuel and remain aloft to search for survivors and assess damage.

The Disaster and Failure Studies Program at NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) [http://www.nist.gov/el/disasterstudies/index.cfm] (see letter) will utilize the Instrument for their Disaster and Failure Events Data Repository. The Instrument's mapping and query systems will also enable research in earthquake analytics through enhanced spatio-temporal querying of earthquake data mashed up with multi-temporal imagery and many archival and real-time datasets, ranging from demographics to historical traffic speeds in street segments.

The Instrument will enable research that advances the capabilities of cyber infrastructure to benefit disaster mitigation. The Hazards & Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina [http://webra.cas.sc.edu/hvri/] and research groups at the University of Miami (see letters) will utilize the Instrument in their work on Hurricane-Resilient Community Systems towards creation of an NSF Engineering Research Center joint with FIU.

Faculty of the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami [http://www.rsmas.miami.edu/], as stated in their commitment letter, will utilize the Instrument for research and education efforts in Disaster Resiliency.

The team of Dr. Jeffrey Onsted [http://www2.fiu.edu/~jonsted/] at FIU and their extramural colleagues will utilize the Instrument for research on land use change along the urban rural interface, farmland retention, and farmland loss to suburban growth. The Instrument will enable the understanding of the formation of tenable land use change scenarios. The Instrument's extensive datasets and querying and analytics capabilities, combined with the capacity to obtain high-quality updates in a short time, will enable the study of past land use change and its impacts, as well as the prediction and preparation for future land use change. This research also touches upon the role of zoning in the mediation and regulation of land use change, which in turn has an impact on land resilience and vulnerability to hurricanes and other natural disasters.

The Instrument will enable urban infrastructure decision-making. As Letters exemplify, the City of South Miami [http://www.southmiamifl.gov/] will use the Instrument's super-resolution maps and advanced analytics capabilities to mitigate flooding from hurricane rains, storm surge, and sea level rise, by enabling better urban infrastructure planning; the County of Miami-Dade [http://miamidade.gov] will utilize the Instrument's super-resolution maps and analytic capabilities for disaster mitigation, emergency preparedness, planning, zoning, and law enforcement activities.