Airborne Subsurface Intelligence

See what’s buried.

Drone mapping for the ground, what’s under it and what’s under the water, so crews know before they dig.

Talk to us What we map

The gap

811 covers liability, not downtime.

A locate request puts paint on the ground. It keeps everyone on the right side of the law, but it doesn’t tell a crew everything that’s down there.

  • Approximate

    Marks show roughly where

    Paint and flags place a line within a tolerance zone on either side, not at an exact point.

  • Unmarked

    Private lines are missed

    Service laterals, site electric and other privately owned lines usually fall outside a locate.

  • No depth

    Depth stays a guess

    A mark on the surface says nothing about how deep a line runs until someone digs to it.

What we map

Measure what’s hard to reach.

Drones cover large, rough or unsafe ground quickly, with fewer people in harm’s way.

Aerial view of a river winding through autumn forest in the Catskills

Terrain from the air

Low-altitude LiDAR turns forests, construction sites and quarries into dense, accurate 3D point clouds, including the ground under tree cover.

  • LiDAR
  • Photogrammetry
  • Volumes
Aerial view of Pepacton Reservoir between green hills under a blue sky

Below the waterline

Green-laser LiDAR reads riverbeds and shallow water from the air, and acoustic flow profiling measures depth, velocity and discharge where boats can’t safely go.

  • Bathymetry
  • ADCP
  • Flow
Open field and tree line at dusk in upstate New York

What’s buried

Subsurface sensing and utility mapping built for the 811 damage-prevention world, with every line documented to an ASCE 38 quality level.

  • Utilities
  • 811
  • ASCE 38

Deliverables

Files that open in the software you already use.

  • Point clouds

    Classified ground, vegetation and structures.

    LAS · LAZ · E57

  • Surfaces and contours

    Bare-earth terrain models and contour lines.

    DXF · DWG · LandXML

  • Orthomosaics

    Measurable, georeferenced aerial imagery.

    GeoTIFF

  • GIS layers

    Mapped features with their attributes.

    SHP · GeoJSON · KMZ

  • Bathymetry and flow

    Riverbed surfaces, depths and flow profiles.

    LAS · CSV · PDF

  • Utility maps

    Each line mapped, labeled by type and marked with its quality level.

    DWG · SHP · PDF

  • Reports

    Methods, accuracy and limits, written in plain language.

    PDF

Delivered in the coordinate system your project uses, such as NAD83 / New York State Plane.

How it works

Four steps, one point of contact.

  1. Scope

    We agree on the area, the accuracy you need and the files you want back.

  2. Fly

    Flights follow FAA Part 107 rules and your site’s safety plan, planned around airspace and weather.

  3. Process

    Raw data becomes classified point clouds, surfaces and maps, checked against ground control.

  4. Deliver

    You get the files, a plain-language report and a call to walk through them together.

About

Built by a mechanic who builds.

Chad is a heavy-equipment mechanic based in Binghamton, New York, with fifteen years keeping machines running. Snowball IMN is what he’s building toward: drone mapping that gives crews a clearer picture of the ground — and what’s under it — before they dig.

Designed with the people who dig, not just the people who fund.

Chad, founder, Snowball IMN LLC

A river winding between forested hills in the Catskills at sunset
Upstate New York. Photo: Clay Banks on Unsplash.

Contact

Tell us what you need mapped.

Snowball IMN is lining up its first projects across upstate New York. Send a few details and we’ll follow up.

Snowball IMN LLC Binghamton, New York chad@snowballimn.com