Best Time for Survey: Pre-Visit Reconnaissance Tool
Every surveyor has arrived at a site only to discover conditions that a 30-second check would have caught: heat shimmer wrecking leveling accuracy, a PDOP hole swallowing RTK fixes, or drone-grounding winds rolling in by noon. This tool runs a complete pre-visit site intelligence check so those surprises become planned decisions before equipment leaves the warehouse.
Site Reconnaissance Dashboard for Drone Survey Planning
Click a location on the satellite map, select your date and device, then analyze.
Select a location on the satellite map, choose your survey date and device, then click Analyze Site to generate your reconnaissance report.
A total station left at its default atmospheric settings (15°C, 1013 hPa) during midday conditions of 42°C and 990 hPa accumulates roughly 30 ppm of uncorrected EDM error. Over a 2 km traverse, that compounds to nearly 60 mm of distance error, enough to fail specification on most highway and bridge alignment projects. This tool computes the exact correction your instrument needs before you leave the office.
Why Pre-Visit Reconnaissance Matters for Drone Survey Accuracy
Pre-visit site analysis turns surprises into planned decisions. Checking atmospheric pressure and temperature before a total station traverse lets you pre-compute EDM corrections instead of guessing in the field. Verifying GNSS satellite geometry for your planned observation window avoids the 14:00 PDOP spike that sends horizontal scatter above specification. And confirming wind speed forecasts before a drone survey saves a wasted mobilization when conditions turn marginal by late morning.
Terrain awareness matters equally. Knowing slope steepness and elevation changes within 500 metres of your control point helps you plan line-of-sight for total station setups, identify safe takeoff zones for UAV operations, and anticipate access challenges. Combined with sun angle data, you can schedule photogrammetry flights to avoid harsh shadows that degrade orthomosaic accuracy, and plan leveling runs outside peak shimmer hours. For DGPS and RTK survey work, satellite visibility predictions flag observation windows where PDOP stays below 2.0, which is where centimetre-level accuracy becomes reliable. This kind of planning, matching topography constraints to atmospheric and orbital windows, is what separates a clean survey from a re-survey.