ArcGIS Explorer Blog : Hurricane Ike

Updated ArcGIS Online Services for Hurricane Ike

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:33:00 GMT

Just a few days ago we published a blog post on the NOAA imagery services and ArcGIS Explorer maps available for download.

Those services are regularly being updated on ArcGIS Online, and whenever you open the map or layer (that you can download from the post above) you'll see the latest published imagery.

Here's what it looked like a few days ago:

And here's what it looks like today:

Comparing the two you can see that a lot of new imagery has been added to the mosaic.

ArcGIS Explorer Hurricane Ike Maps and Layers Now Available

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 22:00:00 GMT

ESRI's ArcGIS Online team has published a service containing recent imagery obtained from NOAA and showing the aftermath of Hurricane Ike for the Galveston, Texas, area. These are now available to ArcGIS Explorer users as a complete map or a layer that can be added to an existing map. To open these in ArcGIS Explorer, just click the map or layer below and choose download:

noaa_ike_imagery_map.nmf

noaa_ike_imagery_layer.nmf

(Note: To use the files above you will need to download and install ArcGIS Explorer. First-time users should choose the map file, which will automatically zoom to the Galveston area. The layer file will add the imagery as a new layer in your existing map.)

Here are some sample screenshots showing the service contents. The first is an overview showing the NOAA imagery mosaic on the Explorer default map. The imagery can be seen as the lighter colored green bands.

Here's a view of Galveston Channel, showing the NOAA imagery with the USGS topo layer from the ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center.

Here's a view of hurricane damage using the Swipe tool, allowing us to view the pre-Ike imagery (on the left) with the post-Ike imagery (on the right).

The imagery is part of the ArcGIS Online World User Imagery collection.

Anderson Cooper, Hurricane Ike, and Gilchrest Texas

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:38:00 GMT

In times of disaster and loss, sometimes it's what's left behind, not what's gone, that delivers the most poignant image of the event. Tonight on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, a lone house, the only one left standing on its block in Gilchrest, Texas, in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, provided a dramatic reminder of the destructive power of nature.

Anderson Cooper interviewed the owner of the house via phone, and here it is as seen in a video on the CNN Web site.

Here's the same area, shown from above in ArcGIS Explorer prior to the hurricane.

ESRI has obtained recently flown aerials from NOAA, and has published a Web service with the updated imagery to assist GIS users in the disaster recovery effort. The imagery has been collected, cataloged, and combined using ArcGIS Image Server, with the resulting mosaic published via ArcGIS Server. The screenshot below shows the swipe tool revealing the pre-Ike (on the left) and post-Ike (on the right) imagery of the area.

In the post-Ike imagery the lone house can be spotted, shown within the red circle below.

Here's a tilted view of the same location, compare this with the CNN video still at the top of this post.

Ike Update

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 21:46:00 GMT

In a recent post we showed Explorer with Hurricane Ike data published by NOAA. Here's an update.

The white track to the lower left shows the previously predicted hurricane track as of two days ago. The magenta line is the current predicted course. You can see that things have shifted a bit east since the earlier prediction. The popup shows that Ike is predicted to reach land just southeast of Houston around 1:00 a.m. Saturday morning.

Exploring Hurricane Ike

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:55:00 GMT

Hurricane Ike is expected to grow stronger as it travels across the Gulf of Mexico, and is predicted to head towards the Texas coast. Potentially millions could be impacted and/or evacuated.

ESRI has posted a hurricane support site with information and links to help get needed software or data.

We visited the site and found a link to NOAA'a National Hurricane Center, where we found GIS data that could be downloaded. Here we've used Explorer and the NOAA data to create a map showing the predicted track of the hurricane.

The attributes include information on predicted wind and time at a location. Clicking to view the attributes in the popup window, we can see on the right where the hurricane is predicted to be at 7:00 p.m. this evening, with winds of 90 mph and gusts up to 110 mph. On the left the popup shows where the hurricane is predicted to be at 7:00 a.m. Friday, with winds of 110 mph and gusts of 135 mph.

The data also includes predicted storm surge warnings. Below, the red outlines show areas threatened by the surge.