Remote Sensing and GIS links page
Tags: links pageremote sensingGIS09 Jun 2015 - MawKernewek
Some time ago I posted a links page, I have added some more and rearranged it a bit:
Remote Sensing sensors and data:
- Landsat home page at the US Geological Survey.
- NASA Landsat Science page.
- US geological survey Earth Explorer interface for accessing Landsat (and other) satellite data.
- ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) homepage. ASTER is an imaging instrument onboard Terra, the flagship satellite of NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS).
- information on TERRASAR-X (Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite).
- The SPOT series of commercially operated optical high-resolution multispectral satellites.
- The European Space Agency's Copernicus programme (previously known as the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security programme (GMES)), including the current and upcoming Sentinel series of Earth observation satellites.
- Including information on the Worldview series of satellites.
- In 2000, the Space Shuttle flew a radar that produced a digital elevation map of the world. The 1 arcsecond data from that is now available for most of the world, previously only the USA had 1 arcsecond data publicly released, with the data covering the rest of the world released at 3 arcseconds resolution. Since September 2014, the 1 arcsecond data has been released for most of the world.
Earth-based Applications of Remote Sensing and GIS
- By the International Arctic Research Center (IARC) in corporation with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
- Johnny Ryan, PhD student of Prof. Alan Hubbard in Aberystwyth University, writing about the project using a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in West Greenland to survey the cryosphere at fine temporal and spatial scales. Johnny tweets as @glaciology_uavs.
- by the US Geological Society using Landsat and other remote sensing information.
- A map of (modelled from urbanization) night sky light pollution across Europe. A map of Great Britain can be viewed at www.avex-asso.org/dossiers/wordpress/?page_id=127
- A map of artificial light at night based on satellite observations from 2006, covering the whole world.
- The idea behind the Past Earth Network (PEN) is that much can be learned about how our climate models will perform in a changed climate, by studying past climate. To make this happen, the network will improve communication between Palaeo-climate scientists and statisticians.
- a special issue of the open-access journal Remote Sensing, focusing on object-based methods of image analysis. This includes the paper Clewley et al. 2014 demonstrating RSGISLib and other Python-based open source software techniques.
- UAV studies of forests by the Institute of Aviation in Warsaw & the Forest Research Institute in Sękocin. Google Translate to EnglishUsing UAVs with optical and near-infrared cameras for forest health studies. Google Translate does make some mistranslations, but it is generally comprehensible if you ignore the bit about the 'raids' on the forest.
- a daily picture showcasing something in Earth Science.
Planetary Science Applications
- NASA Planetary Data System.
- PDS Geosciences Node Orbital Data Explorer, covering Mars, the Moon, Mercury and Venus.
- Main NASA Mars page.
- JMARS is an acronym that stands for Java Mission-planning and Analysis for Remote Sensing. It is a geospatial information system (GIS) developed by Arizona State University's Mars Space Flight Facility to provide mission planning and data analysis tools to NASA's orbiters, instrument team members, students of all ages, and the general public.
- HiView is a downloadable software tool, the best way to explore HiRISE (the high resolution imaging instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) images of the Martian surface at the full resolution of the imagery.
- The main page at the European Space Agency giving infromation about the Mars Express mission, images, and the latest news.
- web interface to the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera image archive.
- Stephen Brough, PhD student at Aberystwyth's blog about his research on glaciers on Mars.
- website of Professor Dave Marchant of Boston University's Antarctic Research Group about the Dry Valleys of Antarctica as an analogue to conditions on Mars.
- a crater in the mid-latitudes of the southern hemisphere of Mars, which shows glacier-like features in its walls. Paper by W. Hartmann et al.
- From the USGS, a list of links to various Mars datasets including mosaicked Mars Global Surveyor imagery and topography, and many others.
- What time is it on Mars?
- information on Chang'e 3 Chinese lunar mission.
- information on Chang'e 3 Chinese lunar mission.
- Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter homepage.
- NASA Cassini Orbiter page.
- Cassini Imaging Central Laboratry for Operations - Optical and near infrared imaging from the Cassini spaceprobe.
- Cassini Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer website.
- One of the remotest sensors of all, NASAs New Horizons probe flying by Pluto on 14th July 2015.
Astronomy links
- On August 21, 2017, millions of people across the United States will see nature's most wondrous spectacle — a total eclipse of the Sun. It is a scene of unimaginable beauty; the Moon completely blocks the Sun, daytime becomes a deep twilight, and the Sun’s corona shimmers in the darkened sky. This is your guide to understand, prepare for, and view this rare celestial event. March 20th 2015 eclipse in Faroe Island and Svalbard.
- A website that details the passes of the International Space station, Iridium flares and other artificial satellites, as well as providing information on planets etc. visible in the sky.
- Free planetarium software. The program enables you to draw sky charts, making use of the data in many catalogs of stars and nebulae. In addition the position of planets, asteroids and comets are shown.
- Solar Eclipse prediction software, which shows the track of the moon's shadow on the Earth, and local circumstances including magnitude, start/end times and duration of totality for eclipses between 13000BC and 16999AD. Also see LmapWin for lunar eclipses.
Remote Sensing and GIS software, tutorials etc.
- Dan Clewley's blog on open-source remote sensing software.
- Online access to ArcGIS Help.
- QGIS project page where you can find the free and open source QGIS software.
- A self-paced course on free & open source software for geospatial (FOSS4G) applications from the Free and Open Source Software 4 Geo Academy. 5 self-paced courses using QGIS (and a bit of GRASS7) are available.
- QGIS blog by QGIS developer and data visualisation specialist Anita Graser.
- A GIS blog containing tips and tutorials on QGIS.
- Blog by Luca Congedo, the author of the Semi-Automatic Classification Plugin for QGIS that allows for supervised Land Cover classifications.
- This reference manual details the use of modules distributed with Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS), an open source (GNU GPLed), image processing and geographic information system (GIS).
- Carleton University Open Source GIS tutorials.
- a free and open source program to manage GPS data. This can import data from a GPS device and add map layers from OpenStreetMap and digital elevation model data.
- GIS information portal.
- Online converter in Javascript from Lat/Long to OSGB grid references and vice versa.
- -Downloadable Grid Inquest software from the UK Ordnance Survey to convert between Lat/long and OSGB grid references. An online batch converter is also available.
- An online database of spatial reference descriptions in a large number of geographic and projected coordinate systems.
- Flex Projector is a freeware, cross-platform application for creating custom world map projections. The intuitive interface allows users to easily modify dozens of popular world map projections - the possibilities range from slight adjustments to making completely new projections. Flex Projector is intended as a tool for practicing mapmakers and students of cartography.
- free open source image analysis software.
- Geomorphons are a pattern recognition method of terrain analysis developed by Tomasz Stepinski and Jaroslaw Jasiewicz. It is available as a Web-based utility that allows users to calculate geomorphons maps from their own DEMs (for smaller datasets) and also as a GRASS7 module. Blog post including video of lecture about it.
- Written by Prof. Jo Wood, LandSerf is a freely available Geographical Information System (GIS) for the visualisation and analysis of surfaces. Applications include visualisation of landscapes; geomorphological analysis; gaming development; GIS file conversion; map output; archaeological mapping and analysis; surface modelling and many others. It runs on any platform that supports the Java Runtime Environment (Windows, MacOSX, Unix, Linux etc. I used it myself in my dissertation on Martian glaciers.
Python
- The official Python website with online documentation and tutorials.
- The Code Academy Python track with interactive tutorials.
- NumPy is the fundamental package for scientific computing with Python. A tutorial with a set of 100 exercises is available at this site.
- Remote Sensing and GIS library: a collection of tools for processing remote sensing and GIS datasets, used via a Python library or XML bindings.
- ARCSI atmospheric correction software (Python).
- Py6S (Second Simulation of the Satellite Signal in the Solar Spectrum) - a Python library implementing atmospheric correction models.
- video lecture on matplotlib (plotting library for Python) by one of its developers (dates from 2008).
- Matplotlib homepage with documentation on using matplotlib to create plots of data in Python.
- Tutorials on Python scikit-learn and AstroML machine learning libraries, and Matplotlib data visualization.
- a website allowing use of the power of matplotlib in a GUI within the browser without the need for coding by the user.
- read and write KML files suitable for Google Earth.
- Joel Lawhead's Geospatial Python blog.
- Python Shapefile library.
- geopy - geocoding for python
HTML, CSS and Javascript
- the web programming track at Codecademy. Javascript tutorials also are available.
- translates the time to an HTML colour.
- A list of named HTML colours.
- online tutorial on the layout features of CSS styling.
- Tutorial for WebGL. WebGL is an in-browser 3D renderer based on OpenGL, which lets you display your 3D content directly into an HTML5 page.
- An example of rendering a large terrain in 3D using WebGL.
Online Mapping
- OpenStreetMap - a free and user-editable online map.
- National Library of Scotland Historical Ordnance Survey maps of Great Britain dating from 1920s-1940s.
- Website of OSM developer Andy Allan.
- OSM data with topography of UK and Ireland exported for Garmin GPS units.
- Jochen Topf's test site allowing a choice of language labels rendering OpenStreetMap.
- A Javascript tool to export directions as a GPX file from Google Maps.
- Draw the elevation profile of your bicycle routes.
- Soviet military topographic maps. The 1:500k series are also available from this website: landkartenarchiv.de.
- The LoTR project has created an interactive map of Middle Earth in Tolkein's Lord of the Rings.
Downloadable GIS data
- Various raster and vector layers are available.
- A categorised list of freely available GIS data compiled by Robin Wilson.
- Geofabrik's free download server. This server has data extracts from the OpenStreetMap project which are normally updated every day. Select your continent and then your country of interest.
- various lists of hills and mountains in the British Isles.
- The Atlas of UK Marine Renewable Energy Resources.
- A collection of datasets focused on Antarctica for use with QGIS.
- A Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Geography Database. The GSHHG is a high-resolution geography data set, amalgamated from two databases in the public domain: World Vector Shorelines (WVS) and CIA World Data Bank II (WDBII). The WDBII source also provides all political borders and rivers.
- Available free to download from the British Geological Survey.
Cartography and Data Visualisation Advice
- Colour Palettes, including selecting palettes to reproduce effectively in print, and for colour-blind viewers.
- Colours for data scientists. Generate and refine palettes of optimally distinct colors.
- Freelance data visualisation consultant Jason Davies' page.
- NASA blog on data visualisation.
- Data visualisation online community and blog.
- Ideas and Techniques about Relief Presentation on Maps. Includes Cleantopo2, a cleaned of artifacts topographic and bathymetric dataset for cartographic purposes.
Google Fusion Tables
- how to use Google Fusion tables to make a visualisation of data on a customized Google Map.
- an example that I did much of the coding for, showing religious themed historical sites in Cornwall, when I was doing voluntary work with Azook.
- a searchable collection of historical photographs displayed on a map of Cornwall.
- a set of more than 1000 free and customizable icons to use as placemarks for your POI (Point of Interests) locations on your maps.
GIS Data visualisation examples
- from the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. Shows a selection of data from the 2011 England and Wales and Cornwall census. The visualisation clips the output polygons to where there are buildings according to OS Opendata vector maps.
- Interactive Map for UK and Ireland, showing the 100 Great Geosites, selected by The Geological Society.
- A web-based map of the geology of Britain from the British Geological Survey.
- is an ongoing project to create a visual, interactive representation of the Earth's history. Observe the geography of Australasia over the last 120,000 years.
- Visualization of weather data. The program can download NOAA (GFS Model) weather forecasts for 8 days ahead for anywhere in the world.
- Visualization of global weather data, with a Javascript data visualization.
- A data visualization project for "Making sense of climate change responsibility and vulnerability", created by Kiln (website with other examples).
- Part of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP). The latest earthquakes around the world are displayed on a map.
- about London Moves, video visualisation of 16 million cycle journeys in London. Website 'Bicycle visualization and analysis' with further information about the research.
General Mapping Fun
- a lot of interesting things done with maps. warning: procrastination alert.
- warning: procrastination alert.
- A website (in German) with many examples of historical maps, including many examples of the Soviet Union's military maps at 1:500k and 1:1M scale, and among other things maps with various European powers realised as animals (often this is 1st world war propaganda - from all sides).
- A business based in Cornwall, offering quality cartographic and design services on a contract basis for clients of all sizes.
Travel time maps
- find areas within a certain travel time by public transport to a location. This assumes you can walk on water.
- similar, allows using different kinds of transport.
LaTeX (Document processing)
- Getting to Grips with LaTeX by Andrew Roberts.
- Blog with tips and tricks about LaTeX editing.
- a good reference. Includes how to make LaTeX produce a page size optimized for many tablets in the Page Layout chapter.
Art/Science collaboration
- by Julian Ruddock. Website showing his projects that are based on art and science collaboration in relation to climate change.
Citizen Science and crowdsourced cloud computing
- Contribute to climate research with your own computer by running simulations.
Games
- Geoguessr - Google Street View guess the location game.
- similar.
- this one has a time limit.
- Urban Jungle Street View.