GIS and Remote Sensing Tools, Tips and more ..

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: