131M American Buildings

A sandbox game with a map 1 to 1 with the ground truth.

An application that simulates shadows at a particular location. For real estate purposes, seeing what kind of sunshine you would get in your backyard when you purchase that house with a backyard in the north.

One of the uses for something like this is to combine it with the best freely-available elevation data (processed/gap-filled SRTM mission + ASTER DEM data) for terrain height, and then landcover data for trees and foliage, in an attempt to predict 3GPP rev-whatever (4G/5G) radio coverage from tower, monopole and rooftop cellular sites.

People have been post-processing and working on the SRTM1/3 data set for the US48 states for something like the last twenty years, and in some cases combining it with more recent space radar data.

VHF/UHF repeater propagation maps and similar are another application. For both ham radio and public safety system more 'serious' radio purposes.

Or to combine with other data sets for things like population per zip code or data sets on demographic info per zip code relative to the density of buildings, unique structures.

Last mile facilities based ISPs and electrical grid operators and similar can use per-structure data sets like this to do calculations on network build or overbuild/ugprade/augmentation costs for specific geographic areas.

An IDF counterinsurgency bombing campaign.

The precision with which Israel have exacted what appear to be controlled demolition of structures strongly suggests to me that targeting teams have fairly accurate ideas of building structure and critical weak points, to the point that they know specifically where, and how many times, to hit a structure to collapse it.

Three-strike hit: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=ZFTK9V_mEjI>

Single-strike hit: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=uHMjQnQTGvI>

Accurate mapping + structure data plus precision munitions is what makes such strikes possible.

Cartography was long considered national-security-level critical data, a situation only mooted by satellite surveillance beginning in the 1960s.

There's a company that does HVAC proposals for technicians who want to generate sales. Knowing residential buildings footprint and layout can be helpful to estimate job size.

Is that where the addresses came from?

Virtually all of the buildings are residential. There are 20x more residential than anything else.