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US Wildfire Data

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
 in GIS and data. 0 Comments

As you may have heard, there are three wildfires burning close to Flagstaff, Arizona where I live, the largest being a monster blaze on the east side of the San Francisco Peaks. Data on the extent and coverage area of the fire has been hard to find in local media, so I did a hunt on the Internet for the data. A lot harder to find than I thought it would be, especially in GIS-friendly format. Here are some of the resources I found:

Active Fire Mapping Program: A US Forest Service site.  Lots of promising links, but none of them were fully up-to-date, the WMS links were all dead, and the “Interactive Fire Detection Viewer” was inoperative (thanks, ArcIMS!).

SSD Fire Detection Program Viewer: From NOAA’s Satellite Services Division. Somewhat more useful than the previous link; has a working map viewer with multiple data layers, including smoke plumes and up-to-date fire locations.

ssdviewer

But there doesn’t seem be an easy way to export the data in GIS-friendly format. There’s a download button, but it only gives the options of graphic and text data export, and the text data is in a very-unfriendly non-standard format.

GeoMAC Wildfire Information: Geospatial Mult-Agency Coordination Wildland Fire Support site, put together by the Departments of Interior and Agriculture. By far the best site I found for current wildfire info. Note: You may need to enable pop-ups for this site.

First off, it has a working map viewer with understandable/relevant data layers. Here’s the current map viewer, with a more classic map-layer approach:

geomacviewer

The beta viewer offers more background map layers, including satellite imagery, street maps and topo maps:

geomacviewerbeta

There are also links to GIS-friendly shapefiles, Google Earth KML files with current fire perimeter boundaries:

schultz621

And a Quick View Active Perimeters buttons for a fast fire map, with legend:

Schultz-6_21_2010 (1) legend

HT to Dan Garcia for the GeoMAC site.




UK Coordinate Converter

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
 in GPS and coordinate conversion. 3 Comments

The UK’s Ordnance Survey has a free high-accuracy coordinate converter for transforming from GPS coordinates (latitude/longitude/WGS84) to OSGB National Grid (eastings and northings):

UKcoordconverter

In addition to this single-coordinate-set converter, there’s an online batch converter, and additional converter options for coordinates in the Irish Grid (good for Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland). There’s supposedly a free Windows stand-alone converter that you can download after filling out registration info, but the registration form doesn’t like my US phone number, so I couldn’t check it out. The OS provides both a set of equations/parameters, and a free DLL, if you want to incorporate the coordinate converter in your own software. And there’s a page with more information on coordinate systems used in Great Britain, including their free “Guide to coordinate systems in Great Britain“.

Other free services at the Ordnance Survey website include a RINEX data server for GPS post-processing, and several searchable databases of assorted geodetic control points:

  • 900 GPS reference marks
  • 750,000 benchmarks
  • 21,000 horizontal control stations

HT to Malc.




Where Americans Are Moving

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
 in Web apps and data. 0 Comments

Forbes Magazine has an interactive US map showing migration patterns between counties in the US for the year 2008.
Click on a county, and lines connect that county to other counties where 10 or more people have either moved to that county (black lines) or away from that county (red lines):

migrationmap

Mouse over a colored county to see the inward/outward numbers, and average per-capita income in both counties:

fullscreenmap

At least 10 people have to move in or out of a county for data to show up.

Via Kevin Drum’s blog.




Historic Maps At The Maps ETC Site

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
 in cartography. 1 Comment

The University Of South Florida’s Educational Technology Clearinghouse runs the Maps ETC site, a collection of 5,000+ historic maps available in JPG/GIF and PDF formats; maps are also viewable in Zoomify windows (Flash interface to zoom in and out of map views). Maps are divided by continent, plus special sections for the United States and the world as a whole. According to the license, up to 25 maps can be used for non-commercial/education purposes; more than that, or commercial use, requires written permission. Although most of the original maps are out of copyright, ETC says they did a lot of cleanup work on them, thus converting them into derivative works under a new copyright; I’ll leave it to lawyers to parse that interpretation. As with any such collection, you may or may not find what you’re looking for, but it’s fun to look:

VA

emancipation

france




World Vector Data (VMAP0 and VMAP1) In Shapefile Format

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
 in GIS, data and shapefile. 1 Comment

About three years ago, I posted about Penn State’s Digital Chart Of The World Server, which hosted old 1991/1992 VMAP0 world vector data from the National Geospatial Agency in E00 format. More recent data is available directly from the NGA, some of it in the higher-resolution VMAP1 dataset not available from Penn State, but the NGA data is in the uncommon VPF format that many GIS programs can’t handle. The Russian GIS Lab website has converted more recent VMAP0 and VMAP1 data into the more-commonly-used shapefile format, and made it openly available for download. You can get VMAP0 data for the whole world at this link, and the higher-resolution VMAP1 data for selected areas at this link.

While you can get similar and much fresher shapefile data for some of this info from the CloudMade OSM shapefile data site, and from the Natural Earth vector dataset, the VMAP0/VMAP1 files include data like railroads, utilities, cultural landmarks and others that can be difficult to track down.




Online Elevation Profiler

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
 in Google Maps, KML and Web apps. 3 Comments

Krystian Pietruszka emails about his new Geocontext Profiler site, based on the new Google Maps API version 3. Place two markers on a Google Maps view by clicking, and get the elevation profile between them:

geocontext

geoprofile

You can add as many additional markers as you want in any direction; to fine-tune a marker position, just click and hold on it, and drag it to the desired spot. You have multiple options for the lines between points:

  • Direct – Straight line between points
  • Driving – Elevation along roads from point to point (like this preset example for Death Valley):

deathvalley

deathvalleyprofile

  • Bicycling/walking

Click on the Geolocation IP link at right to jump to your local area; click on the double-arrow icon in the upper right corner to go to full-screen-width for the app (and back again). You can also link to a profile, or embed it on your site:

Note: The “Import KML” link in the upper left of the map will let you load and display KML data on the map, but doesn’t create an elevation profile between points or along a line.




Prune GPS/Geotagging Tool At Version 10

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
 in GPS and geotagging. 2 Comments

Been a while since I last posted about Prune (version 6) (earlier posts about versions three and four), a GPS data manager, visualizer and photo geotagger. It’s Java-based, so it runs in Windows, Mac and Linux, not a common trait with GPS software. Just checked the website, and discoverd that Prune is at version 10 (!), and has progressively added features with every version. Current feature set (from the website) includes:

  • Loading of coordinate data from file in any text-based format, with any combination of fields and any separator, or in GPX or KML or KMZ or NMEA format. Xml files can be zipped or gzipped.
  • Loading of coordinate data from GPS receivers using gpsbabel.
  • Top-down, zoomable, draggable view of data points including map images from Openstreetmap or any similar map tile server (eg opencyclemap, openpistemap).
  • Caching of map tiles to disk for faster access and offline use.
  • Altitude profile view or speed profile view.
  • Selection of individual points and ranges to show details.
  • Deletion of duplicates and variable compression of track.
  • Deletion of selected points and ranges, and reversal of ranges.
  • Editing of point data, and creation of waypoints.
  • Re-ordering of waypoints within data set.
  • Saving of data in specified text format, XML format (GPX, KML, KMZ) or sending to GPS receiver.
  • Interactive 3d display of data.
  • Export to POV format for rendering of 3d model by Povray.
  • Loading of photos in jpeg format with or without coordinate data in exif tags.
  • Connection of photos to points, and saving of coordinates in exif tags. (requires exiftool)
  • Automatic correlation of photos with track points using each photo’s timestamp.
  • Inclusion of photo thumbnails in KMZ export.
  • Generation of charts (eg altitudes, speeds) either on screen or exported to SVG file.
  • Launch of browser showing area in various map websites such as Google Maps or Openstreetmap.
  • Multiple Undo.
  • Multiple language support – currently EN (English), DE (German), DE_ch (Swiss German), ES (Spanish), FR (French), IT (Italian), PL (Polish), ZH (simplified Chinese), JA (Japanese) and Portuguese (PT) are supported. Turkish (TR), Romanian (RO), Indonesian (ID) and Afrikaans (AF) are partially supported.

Screenshot (with 3D track window open):

prunefull

You’ll need to have Java installed on your system just to run the program. But full functionality requires download and installation of a number of needed software packages, as described on the “Dependencies” page; all are free and available for all OS platforms.




Map Projects From Stamen Design

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
 in cartography. 1 Comment

Stamen Design is a “design and technology studio in San Francisco”, with a definite bias towards data visualization in general, and maps in particular. Found out that I’ve already covered one of their projects before, the Walking Papers project which lets you add data to the OpenStreetMap project with paper maps. But just poking around their list of projects a bit, I found:

Continue reading ‘Map Projects From Stamen Design’




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