By fusing the World Elevation services with the World Landsat services, we’ve created a uniquely beautiful representation of the Landsat data – the Landsat Shaded Basemap. What are the features of this extraordinary service?
- This image service uses 8000+ best quality scenes selected from orthorectified USGS GLS 2000 and 2005.
- All images are radiometrically calibrated to apparent reflectance.
- All images are Gram-Schmidt pan-sharpened.
- The image service is color balanced.
- The hillshading enhancement accentuates terrain.
The original implementation served this basemap as a dynamic service with radiometric calibration, mosaicking, pan-sharpening, color balancing and hillshading all being applied on-the-fly. This exhibited the true power of dynamic image processing, which enabled us to quickly release this beautiful basemap without prolonged wait for processing and enormous disk space requirements.
After its release, this service quickly gained popularity and was among the top hit services due to its visual appeal and the way it accentuated details. The most common usage was to utilize this service as a backdrop in a customized map, which motivated us to make it faster.
Upon the release of ArcGIS 10.1 SP1, a new set of tile caching tools joined the geoprocessing family. These tools are capable of generating tile caches from a raster dataset or a mosaic dataset locally on your desktop—without the need for ArcGIS Server. While ArcGIS Server caching is still the recommended workflow for large, cross-platform, multi-machine cache jobs, the tile caching tools on desktop provide a lightweight alternative for relatively small cache jobs. This impressive capability is demonstrated by caching the basemap and attaching the tiles to the dynamic image service.
Now, enjoy this useful and stunning basemap at blazing fast speeds!
Contributed by: Hua Wei
