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Category Archives: Geospatial
Breaching the Frozen Frontier – Studying the Poles via Geospatial Data
With a population that is expected to reach 7 billion in 2011, it is fascinating to contemplate that there are still reaches of the earth where humans have never set foot. However, thanks to the proliferation of satellites and ever-improving satellite imagery, there may come a time when we will have virtually set foot on every part of the earth’s surface. The planet’s poles are prime candidates for exploration via satellite. The harsh climates make physical exploration difficult, dangerous, and expensive. But thanks to advances in GIS technology, scientists of every discipline will have the opportunity to research previously unknown facts on an unimagined scale. Continue reading
Public Works Technology on a Shoestring Budget
This article was guest-written by Nancy Mann Jackson
City and county budgets have been slashed over the past few years, but residents still expect the same level of service they enjoyed during more prosperous times. Public works departments still must pick up garbage and recyclables, repair potholes, and maintain other services, but with less money. In some cities, public works departments are finding ways to go beyond the status quo, creatively using technology to improve services in an affordable way.
For instance, a new city administration in Chicago recently initiated a 10 percent budget cut across all departments, but services continue to improve, thanks to creative solutions implemented by Thomas Byrne, commissioner of the Department of Streets and Sanitation. One ward supervisor oversees each of the city’s 50 wards, and those supervisors once spent many hours driving around their wards, keeping up with the sanitation trucks assigned to them and making sure they stayed on schedule. Byrne and his staff recently installed GPS devices in each sanitation truck, and connected those devices to Blackberry devices provided to the ward supervisors. “Now a ward supervisor can go to the [Chicago Mobile Asset Tracker] CMAT database with his Blackberry anytime and it shows him where each truck is that is assigned to him,” Byrne says. “They know exactly where all their trucks are all the time.” Continue reading
Google Maps and Local Photographer Team to Visualize the Destruction in Joplin, MO.
This year has truly been the year of tornadoes. As of May 24, there have been 1,208 tornadoes reported in the U.S. in 2011 (about 875 were confirmed). Perhaps the most devastating of theses tornados struck the people of Joplin on Sunday May 22, 2011. The tornado left an estimated 123 people dead, 750 injured, and about 1,500 people missing. According to NOAA “The Joplin tornado is the deadliest since modern recordkeeping began in 1950 and is ranked 8th among the deadliest tornadoes in U.S. history.”
Google has responded to the need to know more about this destructive tornado and visualize the before and after impact of this deadly and unprecedented event. Google Maps now includes a visualization (seen here) of the tornado’ path. The path of the storm can be followed by the fuchsia line. The starting point is marked with red, and the end point is marked with green. The light green area of the map represents the part of the city with scattered reports of damage. The damage is mostly from downbursts and falling debris. The dark green is the area that the tornado caused severe damage and the red area was totally destroyed. Continue reading
More than Just Maps – How Public Works Departments are Realizing the true Power of GIS
The visual appeal of a well-designed map created in GIS can blind many to the treasure within. It can also lead people to believe all we are doing is making pretty maps. If you’re working for an agency that still doesn’t “get” GIS, how can you help open their eyes to the true value hidden within the map? Sometimes the best way is to determine a question your agency has always wondered about and use GIS to provide the answer.
One question for our city was, does every building in the city have a water meter? To answer this, we simply plotted in GIS all the water meter accounts using addresses from a file given to us from water billing. Then we compared these account locations to the locations of existing buildings. We used the polygons from our building feature, but we could have also used an aerial. By doing this, we could tell right away where there was a building but no meter. And where we knew there was a building that had to be using water but was shown with no meter, we knew something was wrong. Because we also have water service lines and shut-off valves in GIS, we could also see if there was a service but no meter. But any utility could perform the same check even if they had no service or shut-off data. Continue reading
Geospatial Revolution Episode 4 – Mapping Power to the People
The fourth and final episode of Geospatial Revolution, a public service media initiative aimed at educating us about the world of digital mapping and how it is changing the way we think and use maps, premiered earlier this month.
The episode, titled “Mapping Power to the People,” looks at the world around us and provides examples of how the global population and governments are use mapping and geospatial technology.
Representatives from public sector organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are prominently featured and both offer testimonials to the necessity of mapping in global analysis of crop production, global disease prevention, etc. Continue reading
Google Earth and Google Maps – Going to Work for Public Good
Today, GIS enables the mapping of locations and objects, the placement of intelligence into the objects and the use of tools and applications to derive knowledge from this converged data, often for the public good. Take AIDS.gov, for example. AIDS.gov is an internet portal for all Federal domestic HIV and AIDS resources and information, provided by the U.S. Department of Health and Human services. Continue reading
In Celebration of Earth Day – Meet Google Earth Day
Earth Day 2011 is on April 22 but Google Earth Day is taking place all week long and is showcasing just how government agencies are putting Google Earth to work, for the good of our planet! Continue reading
What’s New in AutoCAD 2012? Join Lynn Allen for the Autodesk Virtual Event, April 20th
Hi, everyone. Join me at the Autodesk Virtual Event on April 20th where I will be showing everyone the new features inside of AutoCAD 2012. My session, Explore the World of AutoCAD 2012, is at 9:00 AM PDT and I will be showing some of my favorite features like Model Documentation, 2D and 3D Associative Arrays and Overkill – yes, now it’s a real live command! Those are just a few of my favorites. Continue reading
GeoEye Ups the Ante with its Geospatial Imagery of Earthquake-stricken Japan
On March 11, 2011, the world’s gaze turned toward Japan when a 9.0-magnitude quake and tsunami laid waste to Japan’s northeastern coast, costing thousands of lives and potentially causing a nuclear event at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power. While the world was glued to the TV and internet, watching the disaster and human interest stories unfold, two of the top geospatial satellites currently in orbit, GeoEye-1 and IKONOS, were chronicling the disaster from a very different vantage point – and potentially saving precious hours and millions of dollars in disaster recovery and re-build efforts.
Thanks to the updated satellite images, GeoEye was able to gather and disseminate to the government of Japan, other relief agencies, and even companies like Google, the hardest hit regions could be picked out, and recovery plans were able to be made more accurately than ever before. With the ability to implement the new data in mapping technologies, routes that were flooded or otherwise impassable were avoided without wasting time and resources that would have come with a trial and error approach required in the past. Continue reading
Geospatial Revolution – Using Geospatial Intelligence for Safety
Geospatial Revolution, a public service media and outreach initiative aimed at educating us all about the world of digital mapping and how it is changing the way we think, behave, and interact is well underway. Episode three in a series of four-part project episodes, was released earlier this month and focuses on geospatial technology as it relates to public safety and the public sector.
Developed by Penn State Public Broadcasting, episode three, “Serving and Protecting”, discusses the imperatives of geospatial intelligence, groundbreaking mapping technologies used in war and peace and other examples of how this technology is being utilized at all levels of government.
To the war fighter, geospatial intelligence is critical. Episode three examines the importance of layering high resolution imagery over mapping allowing soldiers to gain a better idea of the terrain and their environment (such as the use of GIS technology to map and image the ethnic profiles of towns and villages during the Bosnian conflict). There are also several great testimonials from Letitia Long, Director, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Gen. Wesley Clark, US ARMY (Ret.) and Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Mike Lee, USAF Brigadier General, and others. Continue reading
