Hooray for NASA's Phoenix!

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Mon, 26 May 2008 00:30:00 GMT

Though only given 50-50 odds, NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander completed a successful touchdown just a short while ago, completing a remarkable 296-day, 422-million-mile journey. In celebration of the milestone, the first-ever landing near Mars' north pole, we decided to have a closer look at the red planet using ArcGIS Explorer.

How'd we do this? We made use of some of the freely available content published on the Geography Network. Here's how.

First we started ArcGIS Explorer and clicked File > Open to show the Open Content dialog. We choose Servers, and then clicked the button at the top to choose ArcIMS (all services on the Geography Network are currently published via ArcIMS). We typed in the connection information shown here:

For Geography Network services we don't need a user name or password, so we just left those fields blank. Once you establish a connection to a server it will be saved in your list of connections, and you won't have to enter this information again. Once connected you'll see it open in the connection list.

Here we've scrolled down the list of available Geography Network services (there's a lot to choose from) until we reached NASA Mars, then double-clicked it.

We also accepted the defaults for the dialogs that appeared after our selection, except for the IMS Layer visibility. ArcIMS services can contain many sublayers, and you can choose which ones you want to add. In this case we wanted to add the two sublayers in the Mars service as individual layers so we could control the label visibility independently of the Mars imagery. So we repeated this twice, once to add the Mars imagery, and a second time to add the place labels.

When we were finished, we had two new layers in our map that allowed us to create the mars scene at the top of this post.

Taking a Look at Earthquakes (in many different ways)

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:27:00 GMT

This morning a 5.2 quake hit Illinois, shaking a large part of the Midwest, with many aftershocks following the main temblor. The quake was believed by USGS scientists to have involved the Wabash fault, an extension of the New Madrid fault. That fault generated the 1812 New Madrid quake, one of the largest ever recorded in the US.

So this morning we took at look at things using Explorer, first connecting to an ArcIMS service found on the Geography Network. We connected to the Geography Network at www.geographynetwork.com and added the ESRI_Quake_Rec service to Explorer. That service is updated every 15 minutes by ESRI and the USGS.

We also added the USGS topo service (physical features layer) from the Explorer Resource Center (Contents > Layers) and here's how things looked.

Next we visited the USGS Hazards Program site, and downloaded the CSV file for magnitude 1+ earthquakes over the last 7 days. We used Explorer's import capabilities to create results from the lat/long coordinates to add them to our map. We chose the magnitude as the title, and date and time as the description. And below we've used the swipe tool on the topo layer to reveal the imagery underneath.

From the same site we also clicked to open the KML file.

Next, we imported the CSV file and created a file geodatabase. Why did we do that? You'll find out in a couple of paragraphs, but here's the local file geodatabase in Explorer. When we click on the earthquake location point, the attribute information for the quake is displayed.

Using the file geodatabase from above, we decided to be a little more creative. We buffered each point (to create polygons at each quake location for better visualization) then symbolized and extruded each of those polygons based on the earthquake magnitude using ArcGlobe. To make things more visually dramatic, we added a multiplier to the magnitude just to extrude the features further. We saved the ArcGlobe .3DD file, and published it via one of our ArcGIS Servers.

Here's the area around southern California, and you can clearly see that during the past week this region has been seismically active too.

Finally, we tapped into the USGS "Shakemap" GeoRSS feed for a real time feed of live earthquake information.

Now we'll have to be honest and let you know we're cheating a bit with this one, but only just a little bit. The above screenshot showing a GeoRSS connection was created using today's daily build of Explorer hot off the development machines.

For everyone else, you won't be able to connect to a GeoRSS feed using the currently released Explorer 450, but you'll be able to do everything else we've shown here. GeoRSS support is just one of the many new features we'll be releasing with Explorer 480.

ArcGIS Explorer Blog : Geography Network

Hooray for NASA's Phoenix!

Taking a Look at Earthquakes (in many different ways)