Mapping Center

Recently, a new version of ColorBrewer called ColorBrewer 2 (colorbrewer2.org) was released by Axis Maps (www.axismaps.com). ColorBrewer is a web tool for selecting colors for maps. The original ColorBrewer was released in 2002, and the update incorporates comments that the developers, Dr. Cynthia Brewer of Penn State University and Dr. Mark Harrower of University of Wisconsin Madison (he used to be a grad student at Penn State), have received over the years. Here are what some of the new features are. Read More...

On Thursday, June 25, Charlie Frye (ESRI Mapping Center) and Mark Ho (ESRI Educational Services) will present the Live Training Seminar Getting Started with Map Templates at 9am, 11am, and 3pm Pacific Time.

This seminar will provide an overview of what map templates contain, how to get started, and how to adapt the contents of the templates or evolve your data to your mapping needs. Participants will learn where to find and download map templates. Templates include example map documents, data models, geoprocessing tools, and more—each template is a complete solution for a given kind of map. This seminar will then discuss how you can use your data with map templates to produce professional quality basemaps and publish them. Read More...

A couple of weeks ago, Aileen wrote a blog post called "About geographic transformations and how to choose the right one". In it, she described many of the parameters that you can set for map projections.  Two that were not mentioned were angular and linear units, so I thought it might help to describe them here. Read More...

Last week's blog post Filling in and clipping in a raster described how to fill in holes in a "bad DEM" using data from an existing "good DEM", then clip it to the outline of a feature.

The blog post suggested using some ArcGIS geoprocessing tools that available with the Spatial Analyst extension. As with most GIS operations, there is more than one way to get to the final answer! In this blog post, I describe how Map Algebra can be used to achieve the same results.

We can break this process down into three steps. Read More...

Sometimes you want to use raster data, like a digital elevation model (DEM), but it doesn't have the same exact extent as the area you are mapping. For example, if I use gtopo30 and "countries" data (available on the ESRI Data and Maps CD) to create map of the Pacific Northwest, the coastline boundaries do not coincide. In some places the elevation values are missing for inland areas, and in other places, there are elevation values outside the extent of the land area. So we need a way to clean up the data and make them coincide. Just clipping won't work as this won't add the missing elevation values.

I can fix all this if I have some other elevation data to fill in the missing interior elevation. For example, I can use etopo2 data (also on the Data and Maps CD) to get the elevation values for the pixels that need them. Read More...