GIS and Remote Sensing Tools, Tips and more ..

Open Source software has come a long way in recent years for storing, manipulating and presenting spatial data. The Openstreetmap (www.openstreetmap.org) project is a great example of what can be achieved using open software and open data. This presentation will look at using a combination of postgis, geoserver and openlayers to process, store and present vector and raster map data. The presentation will also demonstrate OGC web mapping protocols, map projections, spatial toolkits (including uDig, gdal and ogr) and sources of free geospatial data. Gavin Jackson is a software engineer working in the Spatial Team on the Atlas of Living Australia project (www.ala.org.au). Bio: A software engineer with 10 years experience (BInfTech ANU, Msc UNSW), he has worked in a variety of environments, including Department of Defence (IT Security), CPT Global (Stress and Volume Testing), Les Mills (Software Engineer) and, currently, CSIRO (Spatial Software Engineer).  He has long been an advocat...

Are you wondering on MODIS products' naming convention? Don't worry !!. This is the time to dig out MODIS names. Let's say you have few MODIS products. Nadir BRDF-Adjusted Reflectance  ( NBAR ): MCD43B4.A2000185.h25v03.005.2006299173851.hdf MODIS Land Surface Temperature Products: MOD11A2.A2002241.h12v02.005.2007222102136.hdf MCD43B4 or MOD11A2- MODIS Product Short Name A2000185 or A2002241 - Julian Date of Acquisition (A-YYYYDDD) h25v03 or h12v02- Tile Identifier (Tile location- horizontalXXverticalYY) 005 - Collection Version 2006299173851 or 2007222102136- Julian Date of Production (YYYYDDDHHMMSS) The YYYYDDD of above products equivalent to 2006299 and 2007222, which means Year:2006 Day of Year:299 (OCT 25, 2006) & Year:2007 Day of Year:222(AUG 09,2007) hdf - Data Format (HDF-EOS) Cheers !!

Creating a kmz image overlay  1. Make sure the dataset you are working with has a geographic coordinate system (unprojected) with WGS84 as the datum. If not, you will need to reproject your data. If the coordinate system of your datasets is defined you can change the projection “on-the-fly”. To reproject on-the-fly, go to Layers then Click Properties and specify geographic with WGS84 datum as the coordinate system. However, I recommend reprojecting the actual GIS datasets (shapefiles, grids, etc.) because project-on-the-fly is not always very precise, particularly when dealing with datum transformations. 2. Switch to the layout view. Select a layout that matches the dimensions of your map as closely as possible. To keep the file sizes of your images small, try to leave as little empty space around the edges as possible. Right-click on the layout and select Page and Print Setup to change the layout size. 3. Right-click on the map and select Properties. Go to the Size and Posit...

Time lapse sequences of photographs taken with a special low-light 4K-camera (made in Japan)  by the crew of expedition 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from  August to October, 2011. Shooting locations in order of appearance: 1. Aurora Borealis Pass over the United States at Night 2. Aurora Borealis and eastern United States at Night 3. Aurora Australis from Madagascar to southwest of Australia 4. Aurora Australis south of Australia 5. Northwest coast of United States to Central South America at Night 6. Aurora Australis from the Southern to the Northern Pacific Ocean 7. Halfway around the World 8. Night Pass over Central Africa and the Middle East 9. Evening Pass over the Sahara Desert and the Middle East 10. Pass over Canada and Central United States at Night 11. Pass over Southern California to Hudson Bay 12. Islands in the Philippine Sea at Night 13. Pass over Eastern Asia to Philippine Sea and Guam 14. Views of the Mideast at Night 15....

map.events.register('click', map, function (e) { //alert(map.getExtent().toBBOX()); x1=parseInt(e.xy.x); y1=parseInt(e.xy.y);     var url = layerhost       + "?REQUEST=GetFeatureInfo"       + "&EXCEPTIONS=application/vnd.ogc.se_xml"       + "&BBOX=" + map.getExtent().toBBOX()       + "&X=" + x1       + "&Y=" + y1       + "&INFO_FORMAT=text/html"       + "&QUERY_LAYERS=" + layername       + "&LAYERS="+layername       + "&FEATURE_COUNT=50"       + "&SRS=EPSG:900913"       + "&STYLES="       + "&WIDTH=" + map.size.w       + "&HEIGHT=" + map.size.h;     window.open(url,       "getfeatureinfo",       "location=10,status=10,scrollbars=1,width=600,height=150"     ); ...

Today, I was working on Shapefiles from Australia and Nepal for my biodiversity research. I found DIVA GIS is useful for the scientist and students who can't afford ESRI's ArcGIS suite. DIVA-GIS is particularly useful for mapping and analyzing biodiversity data, such as the distribution of species, or other 'point-distributions'. It reads and write standard data formats such as ESRI shapefiles, so interoperability is not a problem. DIVA-GIS runs on Windows and (with minor effort) on Mac OSX.

A highly ambitious project by Google, Google Earth Engine , will be launch by  the end of 2011. This project is using high resolution images from more than 30 earth observing satellites such as Landsat, MODIS,  IKONOS, QuicBird etc to build global archive of atmospheric corrected data sets.  According to Earth Engine team, these archives will be" available online with tools for scientists, independent researchers, and nations to mine this massive warehouse of data to detect changes, map trends and quantify differences on the earth's surface " in a cloud computing platform.  Currently, this project is in testing phase with limited  access to few groups of partner including CLASlite and IMAZON .  Let us wait and see how far they can go !!!

Community Analyst includes demographic, health, economic, education, and business data variables to help users develop informed strategies for policy creation and critical resource allocation. Decisions such as matching health care clinics to areas with the greatest need or allocating infrastructure funding for maximum community impact can now be made and supported using customizable reports and maps more .

From last couple of days I was busy on Google custom styling like  http://maps-api-tt.appspot.com/apilite/styled/styled.html  . Fortunately, I found a good tutorial to share to carry out such custom styling. Check it out @ bestfromgoogle  

The U.S. experienced unprecedented tornado activity throughout the month of April 2011. The NOAA Storm Prediction Center received 875 tornado reports during that month alone; 625 have been confirmed as tornadoes, so far. Many of these storms were concentrated during 7 different major outbreaks, mostly in the Southern U.S. The largest of these outbreaks occurred during April 27-28, leaving over 300 people dead as over 180 storms were reported from Texas to Virginia. This animation shows the GOES-East infrared imagery from April 1-30, along with the locations of each tornado that formed during the time (symbolized as red dots). Though tornadoes cannot actually be seen by GOES, these satellites are instrumental in being able to detect the conditions associated with their formation. As the resolution of GOES has increased with each successive satellite series, so have the warning times for tornadoes. The future GOES-R satellite will provide even higher resolution and storm pre...

For my recent project, I have to display county wise time series data of disease pattern in web map for the conterminous United States for 20 years. In addition, I have to use Google maps as base layer and should overlay images on the top of it.  The concept sounds easy, and it was also similar with choropleth or thematic mapping . However, it should be in the Web 2.0. I tried to figure out what are the possible ways to achieve this, I tried and few of them. Here I am going to share the pros and cons of these methods in a real quick and dirty style. Choropleth with GFT 1) Google Fusion Tables Pros: Easy, No understanding of computer programming needed. Upload small or large data sets from spreadsheets or CSV files. Visualize your data on maps, timelines and charts. Pick who can access your data; hide parts of your data if needed. Merge data from multiple tables. Cons: Not much flexible and you can’t tweaks easily according to your needs.  Choropleth with Car...

In the early Friday morning of mid May, I got an email from one of my team member about raster misalignment problem in ArcGIS10. I also tried to overlay couples of previously working Tiff and Grid raster files in ArcMap9.3 and ArcMap10 . The ArcMap9.3 overlay raster files perfectly aligned as we all desired, but ArcMap10 did not. Unaligned Aligned From the ESRI website, I got to know that the issue of misalignment of Tiff in ArcMap10 is a bug in ArcGIS 10. The ESRI team announced two solutions to solve Tiff shift into wrong geographic locations:

Getting to know ArcGIS Desktop is one of the book kept in my collections ever. I started GIS from this book in 2009. It is easy, simple, and step by step tutorials with lots of real time beginner's project. This book has very useful basics for using ArcGIS 10 , especially ArcMap 10 . It is primarily targeted for beginners with lots of hand on exercises, which are easy to follow with plenty of screen shots that made it easy to find the necessary buttons/menus/lists on my screen. However, the major drawback of this book is the ArcGIS software comes with book has 180 days license.   Most of the universities uses this book for GIS beginners. .In amazon.com this book is come up with special discount. Don't forget to catch the deal. I have lots of GIS books in my bookshelf,  I will write about them later. Hope this helps for you. Cheers !! Grab a coffee and enjoy your work..

Today, Nature published a good research about malaria prevention using Malaria against Malaria.  The research was successfully accomplished in  rats. Here is the abstract from www.medicalxpress.com   "  A team of researchers have found that pre-existing malaria prevents secondary infection by another Plasmodium strain, the parasite responsible for malaria, by restricting iron availability in the liver of the host. This discovery will be published this Sunday, May 15, in  Nature Medicine  and has important implications for the management and prevention of malaria, a condition which affects millions of individuals worldwide. " more

The above video about the uses of cell phone for mapping to help disaster victims world wide. This method was initially built for Haiti earthquake disaster, then used by Japan, and currently this technology is using in Alabama.  Today, there are hundreds of volunteers in more than 50 countries creating maps of crises around the world via their cell phones Watch the full episode . See more Need To Know.

Faculty listing, Department of Geography, SDSU As a quixotic geographer exploring and trying new things in everyday in life really matters to me.  However, I would not forget our great people who spent their lifes in geography and inspire me to be a good geographer. I got a chance to know about the history of old geographers and their geography practice then in "Geographic Evolution of Thought". I used to get boared in my history class, but I very much enjoyed the class geographic evolution of thought by Dr. George White at South Dakota Sate University .  To memorize all great people who contributed in the geography department so far, I made a visual list of them.

Today morning, I saw couples of fascinating pictures; highway in the Kali Gandaki gorge, Nepal. This 93km long highway connects the Himalayan district Mustang's capital Jomsom with Lo Mangthang, Mustang . Typically a carrier takes 9 hours to accomplish the journey in this dangerous road. Pictures are taken by Chandra S. Kari, the photo journalist of Nagariknews.com .

Here, I am going to share the styles found on internet to rotate Div. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in IE. Any ideas? style="-webkit-transform: rotate(90deg); -moz-transform: rotate(90deg); filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(rotation=3);"

Think, how powerful in geospatial technology? Finding Bin Laden using GIS?..........Are you kidding me? .......Take a look on this article from G ood politics  share the UCLA students' research on finding Bin Laden's possible hideouts using geographical theories and  GIS software. The students were work under Prof. Thomas Gillespie and John Agnew, UCLA, were published their findings in MIT International Review (Pdf ).

Here are two divs for controlling characters length inside div.     <div style="width:250px;border:solid 1px red; height:30px;word-wrap:break-word;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis-word">                  <div style="border:solid 1px green;padding:none; height:30px">                  asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfa asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdf asdfadf asdf asdf asdf asdfasdfasdfasdf asdf asdfasdfafd                                    </div>         </div>

Quick and Dirty method to Combine MS Search Service, Indexing Service and SQL Server to provide a unified search engine for your ASP.NET website Recently I was developing a site for a company and as usual they needed me to write a search engine. They had the contents in .aspx pages, not a problem, but they also had forums whose contents were collated in a database table, in a column to be precise. They wanted me to display the results from these two sources through a common search engine. Since I had little time to write a search engine of my own, I put the power of MS Search Service, Indexing Service and SQL Server together to do the task for me. There is a lot of scope for enhancement but here is how you can implement a very basic yet powerful search engine of your own. STEP I: Create a Web Catalog in Indexing Service By default, the indexing service has two catalogs, one for the file system (System) and one for the default web site (Web). If Web catalog is not present, you can easil...

Here, I am trying to show how to project/re-project US shape file into AEA conic USGS projection using ArcMap. Follow the following steps: 1. Right click on Layer -> click on Coordinate System 2. Unfold Predefined -> Unfold GCS -> Unfold North America 3. Select North American Datum 1983 4. Click Apply and Click OK 5. Add Feature Data (Points/Lines/Polygons) 6. A warning may appears but ignore it. 7. Find Data Management Tools -> Select Project (feature) Tool 8. Input Dataset or Feature Class (Enter the name of layer needed to be projected.) 9. Input Coordinate System -> Click on Hand icon -> Click Select -> Unfold GCS -> Unfold North America -> Select North American Datum 1983 10. Click Add 11. Click Apply and Click OK 12. Output Dataset or Feature Class (Enter the location of output file and location name: *.shp) 13. Output Coordinate Systemè Click on Hand icon -> Click Select -> Unfold PCS -> Unfold Continental -> Se...

NOAA releases the "before" and "after" shots for the damage caused by last week's F5 tornado in McFarland Boulevard in Tuscaloosa. Those images are captured from 5,000 ft high using special remote sensing equipment.

West Nile Virus (WNV) is the most widespread arbovirus (viruses that are transmitted by arthropods) in theworld. . During the period of 1996 -1999, the WNV became prevalent insouthern Romania, the Volga delta in southern Russia, and the northeastern United States. The spread of WNV covered the United States from coast to coast in four years, and by then it had 7 infected about one million Americans, killing about eight hundred. Here I mapped the spatial trends of WNV virus in the United States of America. Check website - http://globalmonitoring.sdstate.edu/eastweb/maps/wnv1999_2011/

Snippets for adding DOM elements dynamically to the defined DOM element. Here, "mydiv2" is added dynamically as "mydiv"1's child.     //Dynamically generate Div     var newdiv = document.createElement('div');     var divIdName ='mydiv2';     newdiv.setAttribute('id',divIdName);     newdiv.style.width = "565px";     newdiv.style.height = "480px";     newdiv.style.left = "0px";     newdiv.style.top = "0px";     newdiv.style.position = "absolute";    newdiv.style.border = "1px solid #000";     document.getElementById('mydiv1').appendChild(newdiv); A good example by Dustin Diaz to remove DOM elements Dynamically. removeElement JavaScript Function function removeElement(divNum) { var d = document.getElementById('myDiv'); var olddiv = document.getElementById(divNum); d.removeChild(olddiv); }

<html> <head> <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript"> function DetectBrowser(){ // Browser Detection Javascript // copyright 1 February 2003, by Stephen Chapman, Felgall Pty Ltd // You have permission to copy and use this javascript provided that // the content of the script is not changed in any way. var agt=navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase(); if (agt.indexOf("opera") != -1) return 'Opera'; if (agt.indexOf("staroffice") != -1) return 'Star Office'; if (agt.indexOf("webtv") != -1) return 'WebTV'; if (agt.indexOf("beonex") != -1) return 'Beonex'; if (agt.indexOf("chimera") != -1) return 'Chimera'; if (agt.indexOf("netpositive") != -1) return 'NetPositive'; if (agt.indexOf("chrome") != -1) return 'Chrome'; if (agt.indexOf("firefox") != -1) return 'Firefox'; if (agt.indexOf(...

Being a geographer, I am so thrilled in my life. I got opportunities to feel nature from the bottom of my heart. I am also an engineer. I found geography is more interesting than engineering; however I love math, statistics, and scientific computing. I never afraid from math meantime, implementing math in geography is very fascinating job for me. It’s a time to integrate technology with nature so don’t get late to be a geographer and experience ecstatic in your entire life.

There are two ways to achieve this: Method A steps: 1. Download Color Brewer Color Ramp Style Set from http://arcscripts.esri.com/details.asp?dbid=14403 2. Unzip it. 3. Open the Layer properties and click on ‘Symbology’ tab in ‘ArcMap 10’. 4. Double click on one of the color symbol beneath ‘Symbol’ that gives you a ‘Symbol Selector’ window. 5. Click “Style References..” 6. Click “Add Style to List..” and add ‘ColorBrewer.style’ that is obtained from setp 2. 7. If you made it correctly it should be listed in the ‘Style References’. 8. Select ‘ColorBrewer.style’ and make it default. 9. Close the layer properties once and open it again, you will see newly generated color ramp. Method B steps: 1. You have to pick each color ramp value manually from http://colorbrewer2.org/ . 2. Open the Layer properties and click on ‘Symbology’ tab in ‘ArcMap 10’. 3. Double click on one of the color symbol beneath ‘Symbol’ that gives you a ‘Symbol Selector’ window. 4. Click...

I got one solution on delving the internet <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/loose.dtd"> <html> <head> <title> Iframe Loading Notice - Demo</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <style type="text/css"> #holder, #holder iframe { position:relative; width:500px; height:400px } # loading { height:50px; width:125px; padding:1ex; position:absolute; top:50%; left:50%; margin-top:-25px; margin-left:-63px; display:none; border:2px groove gray; background-color:#cccccc; color:#333333; } </style> <script type="text/ javascript "> var loadit=function(){ var f=document.getElementById('myframe'), l=document.getElementById(' loading ').style; l.display='block'; if(f.onload==null){ f.onload=function(){l.display='none'}; if(window.atta...

I got a chance to write a script that converts php array into javascript  array. Here it is.. <?php   $phparray= array(1,2,3,4,5); ?> <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">     var mydata = new Array (     <?php       for ($i = 0; ($i < count($phparray)); $i++) {         if ($i > 0) {           echo ",\n";         }         echo "    \"";         echo $phparray[$i];         echo "\"";       }           ?>     ); </script>