Some evacuees are getting the news about their homes and work places – good or bad – in a way unimaginable a few years ago.

Digital images from satellites are providing aerial views of their neighborhoods in flood-ravaged New Orleans and other areas.

Web sites featuring the images captured just after the storm allow users to zoom in on city blocks and to view time-specific shots of areas across New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

“I’m trying to find my place on Banks Street,” said Satoru Ohashi, 34. He was a graduate student at the University of New Orleans and a professional trumpeter. He drove to Vicksburg with a fellow student.

Ohashi, searching the Web from inside Canufly Internet Services on Walnut Street, is one of perhaps thousands who have viewed their houses and other points of reference online from a wide variety of sources.

The Web site for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is just one of them. It features the National Geodedic Survey homepage and lists ways to click into various images taken from space.

Another site for viewing the area is Google maps, which offer a special link to compare pictures taken before the storm with those afterward, with the help of a red “Katrina” link.

Steve Burtchaell of Chalmette, La., in St. Bernard Parish just east of New Orleans, found his house online using the site, as well as non-satellite photos available on the official St. Bernard Parish Web site. He used a hardware retail outlet as his point of reference.

“Looking at it online isn’t the same as seeing it up close, though. Everything is under water,” Burtchaell said.

On the NOAA site, a user can access satellite photographs by going to the homepage, then clicking the index map for a particular area. It leads to a series of blocks laid over a map of the Gulf Coast and Katrina’s path.

Each block contains some geographic variance, the ground sample distance of each pixel on the computer screen is approximately 1.2 feet.