USGS

QGIS and Earthquakes

Confession – Former Geology Student turned into GIS person.

Back when I started doing GIS we were running on Sun Sparc Stations. I learned a lot – and one of the things I learned was I love to tinker with small programs. The fun one was xearth for a few years. I would run this program and have a terribly bland view of earth running in the background. Then I found out you could add points to it like Cities….so I what I ended up doing was building a series of very terrible scripts to take my daily USGS Earthquake email and toss it into a text file for Xearth. In about a month I had the tectonic plates outlined. I looked like a stud….or a nerd. Probably a nerd but I felt studly.

So I was picking through the QGIS class this morning and I have a few things I want to change. It’s always changing. Given that humanity felt a very large earthquake this week in New Zealand – why not make a change to the class…and it goes a little something like this:

Download the 1:10m vectors from http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10m-cultural-vectors/
Visit the USGS Earthquake page and visit the Geojson data feed -> http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/feed/v1.0/geojson.php

Open QGIS and add your cultural Vectors.

QGIS can ingest “feeds” of data. I used the same trick a few posts back for Fulcrum Data. You can pull in the GeoJSON shares of you data while it’s being collected.

If you click on the USGS Earthquake site you can pull that point data into QGIS. I clicked on the one month summary of earthquakes. Copy the URL. Open QGIS. Add Vector Data and Click on Protocol. Paste the URL and Click Open.

Suddenly – HOLY CRAP EARTHQUAKES!

With a few adjustments to your legend……

I should set up a rules set to handle the sizes a bit better – but this was all done in about 5 minutes. Since it’s Data – you can start doing things like some quick analysis.

7738 Earthquakes.
The biggest Earthquake being New Zealand which was a 7.8
6116 Earthquakes in the US. The biggest of which is a 5.2

Well – fun with QGIS and Earthquakes. Come take a class. We’ll talk about Rocks and GIS.

National Map Corps

I’ve been taking a break from OpenStreetMap – the break is about over though.

I started doing some digging this weekend on the National Map Corps. This is the USGS’s foray into Crowdsourcing. I thought it was something new – it’s been going on awhile. 1994 to be exact. I can’t even remember how long ago I started hearing about The National Map. I’ve got this love hate relationship with it. It’s sorely needed. I’m just not sure if this is the form it needs to take.

Anyway, one problem that always came up in my past life is “Why aren’t these maps more up to date?”. These maps being various and assorted from the USGS. We are quite lucky that there is a treasure trove of readily available maps from the USGS. I’ve often wondered in the age of shrinking budgets how do you curate and maintain that data. I’ve seen the rumblings for over a year about the National Map Corps. I dug into it today.

For those of you familiar with OpenStreetMap, you’re going to walk into a very comfortable place. For those of you who aren’t – you are going to walk into a very easy to deal with place. They’ve taken Potlatch and customized it. Right now there are 10 things you can edit. I know 10 isn’t a lot and I expect this to grow as the program gets some legs under it.

From those 10 things they only want the basics: category, name, address, and how you determined it is what it is. Did you see it, find it on a website, or knew someone who knows? Overall it’s simple. It’s great. It’s a good thing to do currently. So if you’ve never crowd sourced any information – here is your chance. Their is a peer review process currently. You will notice your icons change colors as they are reviewed. So they just aren’t turning you loose with no oversight. The oversight appears to be more guided than the Google Maps peer review process….or as I have called it….oh – I can’t use that term up here.

colors So I immediately started editing. Immediately wondered how I can make this better and I remembered Fulcrum. We’ve had an account post USVI and I decided to put it to use. Given the number of places I go It would be nice to just pull my phone out and record some information about the 10 features the National Map Corps want you to collect. I’ll most likely pull it into QGIS/ArcGIS and use that to guide some of my edits back into the map. I’ve already updated it 2 or 3 times. I even recorded a cemetery down the street from me as a test.

So – I’m going to make the pitch. If you’ve wanted to edit in OSM and have gotten frustrated or have just wondered if you are doing any good – Well – take a break and go over the the National Map Corps. You don’t need an app – all you need is pen, paper, and the ability to click on a map and fill out some information.There’s no reason you can’t make an account and make one edit. Maybe two.

Do something cool. Help.

USGS Ortho Quads and Google

It’s one of the things I always end up falling back to are the USGS 7.5 Minute quad sheet. My forestry clients live and die by them even though they are now getting severely out of date – some as much as 30 years.

I stumbled on this the other day – Google has a map gallery. I knew somewhere in my head they did – but as you can see I use it so infrequently I forgot they had one. They’ve teamed up with the USGS to provide a fairly simple way to download the newer ortho quads . To me (and this is just me) the newer maps, while nice, don’t have the same soul as the old ones. They are nice because they are more up to date – but….SOUL……

Anyway I started looking and immediately downloaded the quadsheet in the screenshot – the Wauhatchie quad since that is in my old (or current) stomping grounds. Well – it’s a GeoPDF. I’m sorta torn about that, but after giving it some thought that might be the best way to deliver these maps to the public. Being a GeoPDF and seeing how it has layers – you can turn off the image if you wish.

Without Image and With Boring Tan Contours

With Image and Boring Tan Contours.

Cool right?

BUT – it’s a PDF.

So gdal to the rescue:

gdal_translate -of GTiff TN_Wauhatchie_20100512_TM_geo.pdf test_ortho.tif –config GDAL_PDF_DPI 300 -co “COMPRESS=JPEG” -co “JPEG_QUALITY=85”

and your favorite desktop GIS software of choice:

So overall I can get the new ortho quads into GIS desktop software. The tan contours lines don’t lend themselves to great visibility. BUT – this might be a decent addition to some of the work I do. So the point of this story – Arm yourself with GDAL. It does many wonderful things.

Apparently the National Map isn’t Essential

The Government shutdown is in it’s….well – what are we close to two weeks in…. The clients of NRGS are typically organizations struggling with data or organizations that need an answer. So I utilize a lot of NAIP, census data, and whatever is freely available. I was employed by the federal government during the first shutdown and I never ended up at home and work pretty much proceeded at a normal pace. This shutdown I’m a consultant working and I’m finding a constant theme for the last bit

Due to the lapse in government funding, (fill in the blank) sites, services, and all (fill in the blank requests) requests will be unavailable until further notice.

Call me crazy – but when I worked for the feds doing mapping work I considered it quite the job. I’m employed by the government in the ultimate truth telling adventure. You might even take that further into the “authoritative” tone of USGS/Census/Gov’t data. Data compiled by the Government is good – it should set the standard. Whether or not it actually does is another story – but I always end up on a Government site downloading freely available data to help clients.

A former boss of mine always believed in the National Map. A central spot to get all your Gov’t available data with appropriate metadata. Organizations have stepped up (ESRI – and thank you) but here’s my rant. Call the online data bullet proof and disaster proof because it’s backed up and replicated and housed in a secure bunker with 500 generators and the best of the best computers….Except Money… The National Map is non essential by definition now (Only web sites necessary to protect lives and property will be maintained.) …..it’s gone until funding comes back.

So to that end if it’s non essential put the data in the hands of a trust…a non profit that is funded and not a commercial company. A non profit not at the whim of the law makers. Open Source it all. Make it freely available. Because until it happens – GIS and all the associated data will be “unnecessary”. It’s necessary. I spent 16 years at the feds proving it was. I now can’t get data I need. I still think it’s vital to protect lives and property and I feel certain that in the event of a disaster it would “become available” because the people ultimately in charge would do the right thing…I hope.

I shouldn’t have to hope though. Neither should all the GIS people out here.

So is the National Map nonessential? No. It’s vital. It’s very essential.

USGS NED Prototype 2.0

So I just got this over email – It looks like the USGS is preparing for the next version of the National Elevation Dataset

The following USGS online publication was approved for release and has been made available to the public.

USGS Open-File Report 2013-1023: A Conceptual Prototype for the Next-Generation National Elevation Dataset

Suggested citation:
Stoker, J.M., Heidemann, Hans Karl, Evans, G.A., and Greenlee, S.K, 2013, A conceptual prototype for the next-generation national elevation dataset: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2013–1023, 52 p.

The URL for this publication is http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2013/1023/

This publication is online only.

I’m pumped. First of all my interaction with Elevation data has always been a bit stressed. In my past life NED was almost a constant thing. “Hey – download the latest NED…..Hey…what’s the date….Hey – why isn’t there better elevation data…HEY…wouldn’t it be cool if everything were made of LIDAR data”. Yes – I wished the world were made of LIDAR Data. Anyway – it’s nice to see they are working on a new prototype for NED. Disclaimer – I only read the first 10 pages. I then found a graph: