High-res, daily revisits. What could be better?

From Oliver: FORMOSAT-2, the first and only high-resolution satellite with a daily revisit capability, overcomes this obstacle to provide a new response to your surveillance needs. FORMOSAT-2’s spatial resolution is 2 m in panchromatic (black and white) and 8 m in multispectral (color) mode.

Dynamic KML

Thought some Kelly bloggers might enjoy this video, I believe Brian shows up to Geolunches once and a while.

"Googler Mano Marks demonstrates techniques for using view based refresh (VBR), and other dynamic querying techniques in KML. He show how it works in Google Earth and Google Maps, and talks about server-side coding techniques for generating the KML. And geo developer Brian Hamlin demonstrates a specific application of Dynamic KML, using PostGIS with Google Earth.

This talk is very useful for developers who want to use servers to store data, and show subsets to their users based on what is displayed in their viewport or browser."

Daylight Fisher!

Daylight Fisher!, originally uploaded by SNAMP Photo Collector.

Check out this cutie. A fisher from the SNAMP project. Marek was flying over this guy last week.

Free Landsat Imagery

The USGS announced last week that it will be releasing the entire USGS Landsat Archive at No Charge. This was the message: Imagery for Everyone… Timeline Set to Release Entire USGS Landsat Archive at No Charge. RESTON, VA – The USGS Landsat archive is an unequaled 35-year record of the Earth’s surface that is valuable for a broad range of uses, ranging from climate change science to forest management to emergency response, plus countless other user applications. Under a transition toward a National Land Imaging Program sponsored by the Secretary of the Interior, the USGS is pursuing an aggressive schedule to provide users with electronic access to any Landsat scene held in the USGS-managed national archive of global scenes dating back to Landsat 1, launched in 1972. By February 2009, any archive scene selected by a user – with no restriction on cloud cover – will be processed automatically to a standard product recipe, using such parameters as the Universe Transverse Mercator projection, and staged for electronic retrieval. In addition, newly acquired scenes meeting a cloud cover threshold of 20% or below will be processed to the standard recipe and placed on line for at least six months, after which they will remain available for selection from the archive. Newly acquired, minimally cloudy Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) data covering North America and Africa are already being distributed by the USGS over the Internet at no charge, with expansion to full global coverage of incoming Landsat 7 data to be completed by July 2008 (see timeline below). The full archive of historical Landsat 7 ETM+ data acquired by the USGS since launch in 1999 will become available for selection and downloading by the end of September 2008. At that time, all Landsat 7 data purchasing options from the USGS, wherein users pay for on-demand processing to various parameters will be discontinued. By the end of December of 2008, both incoming Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) data and all Landsat 5 TM data acquired by the USGS since launch (1984) will become available, with all Landsat 4 TM (1982-1985) and Landsat 1-5 Multi-Spectral Scanner (MSS) (1972-1994) data becoming available by the end of January 2009. All Landsat data purchasing options from the USGS will be discontinued by February 2009, once the entire Landsat archive can be accessed at no charge. Landsat scenes can be previewed and downloaded using the USGS Global Visualization Viewer at http://glovis.usgs.gov [under “Select Collection” choose Landsat archive: L7 SLC-off (2003-present)]. Scenes can also be selected using the USGS Earth Explorer tool at http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov [under “Select Your Dataset” choose Landsat Archive: L7 SLC-off (2003-present)]. For further information on Landsat satellites and products, see http://landsat.usgs.gov For further information on USGS Land Remote Sensing please visit our website: landremotesensing@usgs.gov USGS Announcement

Discovery Channel’s Earth Live Interactive

This is a pretty "flashy" visualization and environmental education tool: http://dsc.discovery.com/guides/discovery-earth-live/discovery-earth-live.html

Google Maps Mashups

Here's a decent compilation of Google Maps mashups.

Historical Aerials

Via The Map Room: Historical Aerials from historicaerials.com. This is a great site. Look what I found for the campus in 1946. Where's our earthquake trap called Mulford? Obvi this is just a screenshot, haven't got the imagery yet, but the interface is good, and the bay area has tons of old imagery (interested yet, Tim?).

Schiaparelli’s Beautiful Canali

For those of you without at least a passing interest in Martian cartography, Giovanni Schiaparelli was one of the first astronomer's to map Mars using a halfway decent telescope. He drew exceedingly detailed maps of what he saw, depicting massive, linear trenches he called canali. He firmly believed these were too straight to be formed by any natural process, and that they must have been artificially produced by inhuman minds (perhaps even cool and unsympathetic ones). His maps were the state of the art for about 20 years. BibliOdyssey has a wonderful post showing some of Schiaparelli's maps, which are far more beautiful than I had imagined, having previously only seen crude reproductions in 2-tone print. Wonderful stuff. Via The Map Room

Source of Sudden Oak Death?

We found it? Featured in SF Chronicle, this article describes Garbelotto's recent pub. Front page.

KML Approved as an Open Standard

The Open Geospatial Consortium announced yesterday that it adopted KML as an OpenGIS standard. OGC is an international standards body, which will now be responsible for the development of KML. Read more on Google LatLong.