Alaska SDMI IFSAR ORI WMS now available!
GINA proudly presents the first half of the 2010 orthorectified radar intensity (ORI) image mosaic. This first half is from the Fugro collection.
We will be bringing the other half of the 2010 into the WMS once we’ve gotten it polished up and consistent enough for integration.
Funding for this service provided by the Alaska Energy Authority’s Susitna-Watana Hydro project.
The PostgreSQL Project has released a security update for all supported versions. This release includes a fix for a high-exposure security vulnerability. All users are strongly urged to apply the update as soon as possible.
The Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) recently released a new version (7.0) of keywords. For those of you currently using version 6 a complete review of your keywords should be in your near future ! One very useful change to the website is that all of the keywords are now available for download in csv format making importing into a spreadsheet and/or database much easier.
Today a Erik Gregg (aka hardwarehank), a former GINA student employee, had a random hack-a-thon session while we were hanging out. I had shown him the GINA Puffin Feeder interface for our near-realtime satellite imagery feeds. Feeder provides RSS feed of the new images. He decided his Saturday evening should be hacking together a native Android client to view the RSS image feed.
The result can be found at https://github.com/hank/gina-puffinfeeder
Looks like when I get back to Fairbanks I’m going to have to see if we can find a new student programmer interested in Java and Android hacking to flesh this tool out.
Thanks Erik!
-dayne
Landsat 8 / LDCM pan-sharpened natural color
I decided to see if I could figure out how to pan-sharpen the sample data product now available for Landsat 8 (LDCM). The image is from March 18th and is over Fort Collins Colorado.
Using the gdal_landsat_pansharp tool from dans-gdal-scripts I managed to come up with a reasonable flow to take the source 16 bit individual channels and merge together the 4,3,2 bands with the panchromatic band 8 to create a pan-sharpened natural color image.
Did this all on my Mac laptop with homebrew providing most of the toolchain needed.
The recipe ended up being a fairly simple and the result is reasonable but not optimal:
Fun experiment for a Saturday evening.
You can download the resulting GeoTIFF from soy - remember you’ll need to stretch the image to get it to look like the image above.
-dayne
Amy Miller at the National Park Service recently send out the following announcement about the work GINA and NPS has been doing with the eMODIS derived NDVI metrics:
The National Park Service (NPS) and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Geographic Information Network of Alaska (GINA) have developed an algorithm to derive NDVI growing season metrics for Alaska. The algorithm is a refinement of that used by Swets et al. (1999) and Reed et al. (2006), and takes as input the MODIS 250m 7-day composite NDVI product (eMODIS). The NDVI data (2000-present) are archived at the USGS-EROS Data Center and subsequently acquired, processed and distributed by GINA. Once acquired by GINA, the data are stacked, filtered, and smoothed into yearly composites. A combined delayed moving average and threshold method is applied to derive 12 NDVI metrics for each year, including onset of greenness and end of greenness (start and end of season).
Direct links to the pages
http://www.gina.alaska.edu/projects/modis-derived-ndvi-metrics
http://www.gina.alaska.edu/services/modis-ndvi
This is a very interesting dataset that hopefully lowers the barrier to asking questions about NDVI trends across the timeframe that MODIS has been around
-dayne
This map caught my eye while reading in Flipboard this morning. There are several more maps in the article, America’s Most Irish Towns, including a map of the most Irish city in America—you guessed it—Boston. Surprising to me is that the top three Irish neighborhoods in the US are in the New York city area.
A tip of the silly green hat to Jed Kolko, who is Trulia’s Chief Economist, and writes a column for the Huffington Post that often includes some excellent cartography and geospatial analysis.
-Tom “0% Irish” Heinrichs
Volcanic lightning. A just plain awesome photo from Astronomy Picture of the Day. (Taken by Martin Rietze.)
Our colleagues Mike Pavolonis (NOAA-NESDIS STAR) and Peter Webley (UAF AVO) will be using volcanic lightning detections from the GOES-R Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) instrument. This exciting new instrument, developed by GOES-R Program Scientist Steve Goodman, will be used to supplement the detection, mapping, and modelling of hazardous volcanic ash clouds. Optical and infrared ABI imagery will be used for detecting and quantifying volcanic ash and SO2. a baseline product capability for the GOES-R mission.
-Tom
New College of Engineering and Mines facility to be built.
Architects can do really great visualizations. These are from the architects’ project presentation for the new engineering facility being built here on the UAF campus.
Nice work by ECI/Hyer Architecture & Interiors and NBBJ depicting this project.
-Tom
