ArcGIS Explorer Blog

Just about 15 minutes ago, as the Explorer team was winding down from a series of meetings this week in a 3rd floor conference room, we felt the building shake - an earthquake!

This was a relatively minor one, only a 3.1 according to the USGS, but it was interesting to learn that its epicenter was located only 3.5 miles away from where we sat. We visited the USGS site, clicked the earthquake KML, and discovered that it was located 2.8 miles below what looks like the 3rd hole at the Redlands Country Club.

Here's a map showing the location of ESRI and the earthquake epicenter from the USGS, and the distance derived using Explorer's measure task. The quake information was updated on the USGS site just a few minutes from when we felt it.

The yellow dots are recent, but minor, quakes in the same area, the largest of which were a 2.1 and 2.2 that happened just a couple of days ago. Hmmm...

For GIS users involved in the Myanmar disaster and recovery, ESRI maintains a web site that lists a variety of GIS data resources. At that site those seeking software, data, or services and consulting help can find an online request form that will enable responders to obtain the needed resources. The site also includes a link to send email directly to the ESRI Disaster Help Coordination Team.

We'll also be spinning up some additional services via ArcGIS Online which we'll include on the Explorer Resource Center, and we'll publish info about those as soon as they are ready. Those ArcGIS Online resource will also be available to use in ArcGIS Desktop.

Many of the currently listed sources publish Myanmar map information as PDF documents. Here we've added a note and created a link to one of those online maps.

We took a look at the Google Lat Long Blog and found a post with a link to a UNOSAT KML with information about the cyclone. Here's the KML with the National Geographic political map from Explorer's Resource Center.

Here's the same KML and you can see that as the cyclone approached land it was a category 4, then dropping to category 2, and eventually dropping down to a tropical storm as it moved across the southern tip of Myanmar.

We've recently had a few questions regarding the legal aspects of using ArcGIS Explorer screen shots in educational materials and publications. ArcGIS Explorer's default content, and the content found on the Resource Center, are published via ArcGIS Online. The ArcGIS Online FAQs cover the use of this content.

In short, yes, you can use Explorer screen shots if you're not using them for commercial purposes, provided you include the required attribution. When you choose View > Copy View to Clipboard, or use File > Print, you automatically capture the required attribution in the lower middle of the screen. 

Last week we blogged about the first two parts of a four-part post on exploring the New Madrid seismic zone with ArcGIS Explorer. The final two chapters of the post have been completed, and are posted on the ESRI GIS Education Community blog.

Part 1 and Part 2 of a four-part blog post featuring the use of ArcGIS Explorer for taking a closer look at the New Madrid Seismic Zone have been published on ESRI's GIS Education Community Blog. Posted by George Dailey, ESRI Education Manager, it's a great example of discovering and aggregating a variety of data and using Explorer to... well... explore!

Stay tuned for Parts 3 and 4.

A Google search for "Earth Day" lists the Earth Day Network as the top (non-sponsored) link. A "Call for Climate" is the call to action listed front and center on that site.

A great site for a variety of content, especially environmental and climate data, is NASA's Earth Observations site. NEO's mission (as stated on the site) is to help you picture climate change and environmental changes happening on our home planet. So it seems like a great site to visit with Explorer on Earth Day.

Here we've added a couple of KMZ files from the site, one showing land surface temperature at night for the period between February 1 and March 1, 2000, and the other for the same dates in 2008. We've used the swipe tool to show the differences (you'll see the swipe lining splitting the globe at its center). The 2008 data is on the right, with the 2000 data on the left. You'll see that things were a bit warmer (blue is cooler, red is warmer, hottest is yellow) in the central part of the US during that time period 8 years ago.

Here's the swipe tool being used again on content from the same February to March time period, but this time for daytime land surface temperatures. Content for 2000 is on the left and 2008 on the right. We've also added the February through March 2008 ocean temperatures.

And what would Earth Day be without a look at the earth's population? Here's the 2000 world population data, also from the NEO site. Try using the swipe tool and other content from the Explorer Resource Center and Geography Network to consider why there are distinct population lines in the middle of the US and along the northern border of India and Nepal.

If you've done some interesting things with Explorer for Earth Day, let us know about it or share what you've done on the ArcGIS Explorer Showcase.

An article just published in the April, 2008, ArcWatch describes the use of ArcGIS Explorer during the search for a man lost in California's San Bernardino Mountains. Here's an excerpt from the article that describes using ArcGIS Explorer:

The 2008 search used a server that accessed a satellite broadband connection to retrieve ArcGIS Explorer 3D visualization enhancements. It was easy to overlay the polyline shapefiles created from the GPS track logs and display them in ArcGIS Explorer to create a 3D map. Aerial imagery or topographic map data was displayed as a background and draped over digital elevation models. Roads and administrative boundaries could be added for reference. This gave a true representation of the terrain difficulty, which was much easier for field teams to understand than a two-dimensional topographic map with contour lines. SBSO personnel were especially impressed that all this information is available for the entire country and can be accessed through the freely downloadable ArcGIS Explorer application.

ArcWatch is a monthly e-Newsletter that provides up to date information on what's new with ESRI, its software, and the desktop mapping and GIS industry. Subscriptions are free.

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.

Jesse and Sue from VerySpatial recently chatted with Bern Szukalski, ArcGIS Explorer Product Manager. The interview is published on A VerySpatial Podcast - Episode 143.

Bern talks about Explorer at the recent ESRI Developer Summit, how it fits into the ESRI landscape, and takes a look ahead at future Explorer releases and current development projects.

Edan Cain, Software Engineer on the ArcGIS Explorer team, has recently posted the source code for his sample that was demonstrated at the recent Developer Summit. You can download it from the ESRI Support Center downloads.

We've recently had a few questions about adding photos, links to Web sites, and more to a note popup window. Here's a primer on how that's done. But before we get to the "photos and more" part, let's start at the beginning...

We've navigated to Mt. Shasta, California, where we'd like to add a note. To create a note, just choose the Create Notes task. We've changed the note title to "Mt. Shasta" and added a short description - "Mt. Shasta, California - 14,179 feet" - as the note text.

When you hover over the note pushpin, you'll see the note title display. When you click the note pushpin, you'll see something like this:

Let's take this one step further and replace the text with a locally stored photo on our C: drive. Right click the Mt. Shasta note in the results panel, or right click the note pushpin on the map, and choose properties.

Below you can see that we've changed the popup content from our original text (Mt. Shasta, California - 14,179 feet) to the pathname to the file: C:\AGX\Photos\shasta_usgs.jpg.

When we click the note pushpin again, we see something like this:

The USGS publishes photos of Mt. Shasta from their Web site, so we can substitute the local photo with one that's available on the Web. The advantage here is that anyone we send the note to can click the pushpin and see the photo since it's a publicly accessible photo rather than one stored on the local C: drive, which nobody else can access.

All we need to do is replace the local file path in the Popup Text property with the URL location of the photo at the USGS Web site: http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Imgs/Jpg/Shasta/Images/Shasta05_aerial_mount_shasta_shastina_from_west_12-10-05_med.jpg

The note popup will look the same as before, but this time the content is Web-based and shareable rather than a local file. To share this with someone, just right click the note and choose export result.

The NMF file you save can be emailed to anyone, and they'll see the same thing you do since the result is linking to publicly available content.

We can extend the popup contents by using HTML. The HTML isn't required if we just want to display text or a single link to a local file or URL like we've done above. But we can use it to add additional content or format the popup contents. Here we're adding a note that will include a title in bold text to our USGS photo:

And now the popup should look something like this:

And now to the "more" part of this post. Here's the HTML you can use to popup a photo of a bird, and also play the sound of its call.

The use of hidden in the embed tag ensures that the program that plays the sound remains invisible.

You can be as creative as you want. For more information visit the HTML markup for notes, results, and files topic found in the ArcGIS Explorer Help.

The next release of ArcGIS Explorer - Build 480 - is coming up quickly, with some important new features and enhancements.  But at the recent ESRI Developer Summit plenary session we took a longer look ahead, beyond Explorer 480, and showed the first public demonstration of ArcGIS Explorer 600 and its new user interface.

The goal of ArcGIS Explorer 600 is to build on the foundation of previous Explorer releases while improving usability and making it more accessible to non-GIS users through the adoption of a new Microsoft Office-style ribbon-based UI.

Using the new ribbon user interface will make the functions of the application easier to find and experiment with. The ribbon also makes it possible to display only the functions that are applicable to what you are doing and hides controls that are not relevant. Other key aspects of the new user experience include:

• Better map content management
• Easier access to ArcGIS Online basemaps
• Improved window management

Like Explorer 480, Explorer 600 will also include some new key functions. One of the big changes coming up in Explorer 600 is the ability to view your map in both 2D as well as 3D. You'll be able to easily toggle the view between both modes to visualize your geographic information in different ways.

Stay tuned for more on the upcoming Explorer 480 and 600 releases...

One of the custom tasks shown during the Developer Summit plenary was authored by John Grayson, a veteran of ESRI's Applications Prototype Laboratory. Here's his description of the task.

This ArcGIS Explorer task has been implemented to visualize data collected by the AIRS satellite, a project of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  The AIRS site provides the following description of the technology:

The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) looks down at the Earth and measures the infrared brightness coming up through and from the atmosphere. The AIRS optical system splits infrared radiation into its constituent "colors". The effect (but not the technique) is similar to rain drops splitting sunlight into a rainbow. The wavelengths used are sensitive to temperature and water vapor over a range of heights in the atmosphere, from the surface up into the stratosphere. The term "sounder" in the instrument's name refers to the fact that temperature and water vapor are measured as functions of height. AIRS also measures clouds, abundances of trace components in the atmosphere including ozone, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, and sulfur dioxide, and detects suspended dust particles.

The data was preprocessed from its original HDF format into a geodatabase where information about when the data was collected and to which swath it pertained is maintained.  Additionally, curtain plots (vertical rasters) for each of the five attributes were generated as a server-side process.  The task starts out by reading the geodatabase and enabling the user to specify which date and swatch to visualize. The screen capture below shows the custom task interface, which allows the user to load the data and choose from different types of information to display. 

Footprints of each swath are drawn, and below they can be seen as blue rectangles on the globe. 

Using the custom task UI, the user can choose from a variety of types. The task uses OpenGL to load the curtain plots for the specified type, date, and swath onto the display.  Shown below is the complete set of curtain plots showing carbon monoxide levels for one of the swaths.

A slider control allows the user to quickly visualize one curtain plot at a time, providing a simple exploratory tool to visualize the data in the display.  Shown below is one of the curtain plots, and using the task slider the user can move forwards and backwards in the curtain plot sequence.

Here is another example, this one showing ozone levels. You can compare this to the earlier screen capture above in this post showing carbon monoxide levels.

The task leverages the ArcGIS Explorer SDK and it's support for integrating custom OpenGL implementations. The task makes use of exposed events that tell us when the application has finished drawing and when OpenGL calls can be made.  OpenGL allows the developer to create tasks that perform visualizations that are not otherwise possible via the Explorer API, and provides a wealth of potential possibilities for the Explorer developer.

Last week was a busy week for the entire Explorer team, with lots of interesting things happening and lots of great discussions in the Showcase area and elsewhere at Palm Springs. We appreciate all of your comments and feedback. We'll be highlighting some of the presentations and those discussions in a series of posts beginning this week.

First, here's a few things that were shown during the ESRI Business Partner Conference and Developer Summit plenaries. We've covered some of the general things that we typically demonstrate in previous posts on the ESRI Federal User Conference, Petroleum User Group meeting, and GITA, so we'll focus on some of the different things that were shown last week.

One of the custom tasks demonstrated is one you'll find on the Explorer Resource Center. Just choose File > Resource Center and choose the Tasks tab.

The one we chose is the Weather Finder task authored by Michael Waltuch, one of the lead designers on the ArcGIS Explorer development team. Just click to open the NMF file, which will add the task to your current session. To learn more about this task click the Description link on the Resource Center entry, or choose About Weather Finder on the task UI. You'll learn the following:

Weather Finder locates the nearest weather station to a specified location and reports its most recent weather observations. The task is based on a reverse geocoding web service located at GeoNames.org. To learn more about GeoNames go to their web site and see the service description.

The popup window associated with the weather station includes a link to the National Weather Service's Telecommunication Operations Center which lists more information and a 24 hour summary for the weather station.

This is a good example of a custom task which has been written using the ArcGIS Explorer SDK to work against an existing Web service - In other words it's a mashup.

Using one of the Portland bookmarks, we right-clicked the pushpin to use the Send To capability to use this location as the starting point for the Weather Finder task. The bookmark itself is the result of a task (the Create Notes task in this case), and when you take the result of one task and send it to another we refer to that as task chaining, and you can read more about that in the Help.

Here's the result of the Weather Finder task, the closest weather station to our Portland bookmark. In this case it's located at the airport. If we click the result pushpin you'll see the latest weather information in the popup, including links to the NOAA site providing more detailed information and historic data for this location.

We also used a task we obtained from the Showcase area on the Explorer Resource Center. The showcase is a place where anyone can contribute tasks, results, or other items they want to share with the Explorer community. We chose the Flickr Task authored by Rob Dunfey, a member of the ArcGIS Explorer SDK team who also authored a blog post with more details about the custom task. This task is another good example of a mashup with other existing Web-based APIs, in this case it uses the Fickr API.

Here we typed in "portland" to return the first 20 Flickr photos tagged with that keyword. Each of the results can be clicked to open a popup displaying the photo.

Another task that was shown was a custom geoprocessing task, authored using the Model Builder in ArcGIS Desktop and published using ArcGIS Server. The task's UI was automatically generated by ArcGIS Server, based on parameters specified by the task author. The ArcGIS Explorer SDK can be used to modify its UI, but we just used the default, automatically generated one. 

Here we've used Send To again to use our Portland bookmark as the input location for a 1 and 3 minute drive time analysis.

In upcoming posts we'll cover more of what was shown, including some of the technical details of the plenary and workshop presentations, and also cover some of the things we showed that are coming in future releases.

An interesting use of ArcGIS Explorer for estimating roof size is covered in an ESRI Education Community blog post.

We'll be at the upcoming National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) conference in Boston later this month. If you're heading there, make sure to stop by the ESRI booth to learn more about using ArcGIS Explorer in education.