ArcGIS Explorer Blog

Tonight (Friday, October 10, 2008) from 6 p.m. to midnight PST, ArcGIS Online will undergo some system upgrades to improve existing infrastructure. During this time there may be some 1 minute service interruptions. If you're using Explorer during this time you may notice very brief periods of not being able to connect to the default map or other maps and layers available on the Explorer Resource Center.

The ArcGIS Explorer default map, and other maps and layers found on the ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center, are regularly updated. These services come from ArcGIS Online and updates are managed by the ArcGIS Online team. ArcGIS Online also offers a variety of map services available for ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Server users.

Some of these changes are subtle (but still important) and others are dramatic. Here's one that we noticed earlier today when taking a look at one of the demonstrations shown during the User Conference plenary.

During one of the demonstrations we took a look at a bridge near Phoenix. In the Explorer default map the imagery showed a bridge still under construction. We added a more recent local raster file of the same bridge, now completed, and used the swipe tool to examine both during the demonstration. Here's a screen shot from that demonstration showing the bridge in the default map on the left, still under construction, and the newer local raster file with the bridge completed on the right.

If we visit that same area now we'll see that the Explorer default map has been updated, and shows the now-completed bridge.

The imagery in Explorer's default map is updated quarterly, and you may have noticed some other updates to the cartography in the Topo, Boundaries & Places, and Streets services. You can learn more about services on the ArcGIS Online Resource Center by visiting the Directory of Services. Select one and click to learn more about its source(s), update frequency, and more.

Updates and changes are also posted on the ArcGIS Online Services Blog.

One of the properties of a map is a Display Overlay, a handy thing to use when you want to stamp your map with a company logo or some other message like we've done below. You can learn more about this and other options under the Setting map properties Help topic.

But in this particular case we used the display overlay for something a little different. We were working on a map for a specific audience, and because of our presentation goals we wanted to hide as much of the Explorer user interface as possible. The goal was to eliminate everything except for the globe showing our data and a legend, and the navigator.

Normally the legend is displayed by right-clicking on a layer in Contents and choosing Legend. But we wanted the legend always visible, and eliminated these clicks completely by capturing it and creating a PNG file to use as the display overlay. We kept a small transparent boundary around our legend PNG so it would be placed out of the corner and slightly onto our map.

To add our legend PNG to the display, we chose File > Map Properties, clicked Display Overlay, and set the options as shown below.

This is how our map looked so far:

But we wanted to streamline our map even further. We did so by hiding the console (by clicking View and unchecking it) and also toggling Auto Hide Menu Bar (checking it on), as shown here:

We also removed the coordinate display along the bottom of our map by going to Tools > Options, and unchecking Positional Text under Map Display:

And here's our final map, with our legend always visible and our minimal user interface.

ESRI President Jack Dangermond's presentation at the Western Governors' Association meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, has recently been posted in the Showcase area of the ESRI GIS for Conservation Web site.

The video of the presentation includes recordings of demonstrations using ArcGIS Explorer, ArcSketch, and a Web application built using the ArcGIS JavaScript API. 

We covered the elements of the ArcGIS Explorer presentation in an earlier post, but the entire presentation is now available online, and tells a compelling story about protecting wildlife habitat areas, managing natural resources, and how GIS can be used to solve and mitigate the sometimes competing issues and problems that arise. 

Glacier National Park was named after the glaciers that carved and sculpted its landscape millions of years ago. But according to the Glacier National Park Web site by 2030 there will be no glaciers left in the park, the result of global climate change. The park originally had around 150 glaciers, but today there are 26.

Grinnell Glacier is one of those 26, and is a popular hiking destination. Here's a recent photo, taken earlier this month during a stormy hike to the glacier's edge. The photo shows Upper Grinnell Lake in the foreground, the edge of the Grinnell Glacier to its left, and the Salamander Glacier and Salamander Falls above the lake.

According to Wikipedia, Grinnell Glacier is one of the most photographed glaciers in the park. Photos dating back to the mid-1800s have been archived, providing documentation of the glacial retreat over the years (shown below from Wikipedia):

The USGS Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center has more details and photographs.

We can also take a look at Grinnell Glacier using ArcGIS Explorer. First we used the GeoNames Search task (covered in a previous post) to locate the glacier.

Here's the glacier as seen in Explorer's default map.

We can add the topo layer (from the layers tab on the ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center) for another perspective.

Comparing the imagery with the older topographic map using the transparency or swipe tools, we can see the change in the size of the lake and the glacier's boundary.

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.

Find Place is one of the default tasks that you see when you first start Explorer. It's a handy way to locate cities, towns, airports, zipcodes, and the like. But what about other places, like place names on a topo map? That's where the GeoNames Search task can be used to complement Find Place, and leverage the vast GeoNames.org database.

Here's a video showing how you can use GeoNames Search:

Now let's take a closer look. We've been given directions to go to West Glacier, Montana, and then drive to a place called The Loop where we can find the trailhead to go to Swiftcurrent Pass, our final destination. We've added the topo layer from the resource center already, and that's where we begin.

Using Find Place, we locate West Glacier, Montana.

To locate The Loop and Swiftcurrent Pass, both placenames on the topo map, we open the ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center to add the GeoNames Search task.

GeoNames Search searches the GeoNames (geonames.org) geographical database. It returns geo-referenced candidates from which you can create results or use for navigation. The database contains over eight million geographical names and consists of 6.5 million unique features.

Here we've entered The Loop in the GeoNames Search. Note that because "The Loop" is such a common placename we've bumped up our maimum number of names to show from 10 to 20 to find the one in Montana. After we find it, we check it and then choose Create Result.

Next we enter Swiftcurrent Pass, and create another result.

And now our map has all three locations, one found using Find Place, and the other two found using GeoNames Search.

Fabled Yankee Stadium, a landmark for 85 years and backdrop to many of baseball's greatest moments, saw its last game over the past weekend. From Wikipedia we got the lat/long coordinates, and decided to take a closer look.

Using Go To Location (Tools > Go to Location), we entered the coordinates.

And then chose Go To and Create Result to navigate to the location, and place a pushpin there.

We then went out to the Google 3D Warehouse, searched for "yankee stadium," and downloaded a KMZ model of the "house that Ruth built."

For more information on using coordinates to navigate or using KML and KMZ files, visit the Go To Location and KML Contents Help topics.

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'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.

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.

Ari Isaak blogs about using ArcGIS Explorer, and publishes an overview video and showing the display options and how to use tasks. The post can be found on %scratchworkspace%, the GIS blog at the Unified Port of San Diego.

Jami Garrison, data bureau manager at the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT), discusses her experience participating in the 2008 ESRI International User Conference Plenary Session where she highlighted ADOT’s ArcGIS Explorer application.

ESRI podcasts are a free and easy way to get the latest news and information from ESRI.

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.

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.

If you watched the Plenary session at the 2008 ESRI User Conference, one of the tasks demonstrated during the ArcGIS Explorer presentation was called StreetViewer. StreetViewer is a “smashup” of ArcGIS Explorer and a Google Street View service that Explorer development team members Rob Dunfey and Michael Waltuch collaborated on. We blogged about the presentation earlier, and here's an example showing the StreetView near the ESRI Campus.

The Official Google Maps API Blog describes Street View as a service that “allows users to view 3D panoramas of various locations around the world and to navigate around neighborhoods as if they were (almost) really there.”

The Explorer task lets you grab a coordinate from the map and if a Street View image is available for the location, the task creates a result at the location and its associated popup window displays the Street View image at the coordinate. You can interact with the image inside the popup window, looking around the panorama and follow the path of the nearby streets. It’s a really cool service.

Since the conference we’ve had a bunch of requests to make the source code for this task available, and have recently posted a project at ArcScripts that has everything you need except for a couple of things. We'll describe them here, and how to get everything set up and working.

First, you’ll need to make changes to a copy of the file named panoAvailable.html that’s part of the project. After making changes to the file, you’ll need to move it to a publicly accessible URL from where it will display the Street View image. So, in panoAvailable.html you’ll see there’s a place for you to specify a Google Maps API Key that corresponds to the URL: