Oblique aerial photography is an airborne mapping technique, which uses a professional grade DSLR camera to capture images out the side of our aircraft. Images are geo-referenced using our GPS systems to provide the position of the plane for each image. The Environment Agency has been capturing oblique aerial photography during incident response since 2010, and for bespoke surveys such as cliff line monitoring. Images can be captured in all survey conditions which can have a large influence on the quality of the imagery.

The imagery is available as a JPEG image. Contained within the EXIF metadata for each image is a geo-referenced GPS coordinate of the plane during exposure. These coordinates are in WGS1984 latitude, longitude.

When requesting download of aerial obliques all imagery within a 5km OS Grid is retuned for each type and year of survey. The 'types' of survey available are 'Incident Response' (data captured in varying lighting conditions usually for assessment of flood extent) and 'Other' (bespoke monitoring surveys such as cliff line assessments).

Please refer to the metadata index catalgoues which provde the date and time each image was taken and the location of the plane. The direction the plane was travelling along with the the image view angle is also provided. The image view angle is an approximate direction the camera was pointing for each image with all images captured out the left hand side of the plane.