JPL 2009 Open House

Just returned from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Open House....Very cool!! Check out the slide show!

JPL 2009 Open House Slide Show




I have never been to this event, but I am amazed at what JPL is doing. They have their hand in so many things.



One of the high lights is the 2011 expected Launch of the Mars Science Lab.





Earth Science - Remote Sensing



Atmospheric Science - Hurricanes, Ocean currents, tornadoes

Geology - LiDAR, RADAR, subsidence, micro changes in elevation, Earth Quake detection

Water/Ice - snow pack, water, ice monitoring



Nanotechnology



nano machines, chemistry and physics to build nanotechnology



Material Science



Chemistry and Physics

to create and produce thin films, silicon wafers



All of these are used in imaging systems



Imaging Systems (for terrestrial and extra terrestrial uses)



UV sensors, Infrared (short and long wave), LiDAR, RADAR



Solar Technology



multi-band solar cells to power probes, robots, space craft



Fuel Cell Technology

for powering probes, robots, etc.



Electronics development for sensors and probe function



Robotics



Rovers that are/will be on Mars and other planets



Aeronautical Engineering



Spacecraft, orbital sensors and systems, launch vehicles, vehicles for carrying payload to planetary surfaces and atmospheres

They also have entreprenureal opportunities, too!



JPL RSS Feeds

JPL Pod Casts

JPL Blogs

JPL Slide Shows

JPL News

Mapping Urban Forest Canopy in Sacramento

I just finished a draft urban forest canopy layer for downtown Sacramento. I developed this for material to present to my Remote Sensing Class and for my students to work on for a lab. I developed a process to extract out urban forest canopy from other features in high resolution QuickBird satellite imagery. This is draft, so other refinement is necessary. I will update when it is complete. Imagery July 2006 QuickBird Satellite (2 ft, 0.6m) Software Used: Feature Analyst 4.2 for ArcGIS

Urban Forest Canopy (DRAFT)

Solid Waste Routing Custom Map Book Production

As part of my re-route work for the City of Sacramento's Solid Waste Dept, I created a custom map book tool that allows a user to choose from a number of solid waste services to produce both an overview map and two detail maps (streets only and streets/parcels) of the route. The tool automatically generates PDF files of each of these. The tool has been timed to generate 200 maps in 8 minutes. Without this tool, it took over a week to reproduce all of the maps. I can generate a full set of maps for a given service in less than 20 minutes.

Searching for a Parking Space (Updated!)

Here is yet another one of my Business Integration problems, I am working on solving for the City of Sacramento. We (I should say, our Parking Division) has a unique way of "addressing" the parking spaces in our downtown area.

I have developed a way to "geocode" these to our street centerline with an offset which will then accompany the Parking Space/Meter attribute information and, yes, integrated to our wonderful Infor EAM (Enterprise Asset Management System).

The Data

Our Parking Enforcement group provided a Parking Space inventory in Excel that contained "addresses" of the parking spaces. These "addresses" are not actual addresses, but do look like addresses. The Parking Enforcement division has maintained their data for years with this system and so on the right side of the street, the "parking space ranges" are from 00-32 and on the left from 01-31 on each street segment. Since these ranges don't match the existing exhaustive address ranges in our street centerline file, just geocoding these to our street segments don't really work. Some modification of the exhaustive ranges are needed.

Modifying the Street Centerline File

Since our Parking Division only enforces parking spaces in downtown Sacramento, only the downtown portion of the street centerline file is required to be modified ~4000 segments out of ~20,000 segments.

Ideally, the GIS team in the City encourages departments that want to create spatial data use our existing centerline file, parcel file, and master address file without modification. In this case, an exception is made to perform a 1 time generation of spatial data for parking spaces.

A series of queries and calculations were applied to compute additional exhaustive range attributes specifically for parking spaces. Most of this step was not too bad, but it did take about 2 full days to accomplish, since specific queries needed to be made to certain sides of the block.

Geocoding the Parking Space File

Once the street segment file was completed, a custom geocodeer was created that used the modified centerline file as the street centerline base for geocoding. One of my co-workers had created a custom geocoding style that we use for other address searching functions in other websites we maintain, so I used this in my geocoder routine.

Once the geocoder was set up, I took the parking space file I imported into ArcGIS (I did convert the excel file to a Dbase file so I could use it in ArcGIS) and geocoded it.

The first time I ran this, I did find some street address range issues, that I needed to fix. After running several iterations of the geocoder process, I was able to geocode all but 78 of the 21,400 parking space records. The 78 end up having "space range" values beyon the xx32 mentioned above. I will need to work with our Parking Division to work this out, but it won't be too much of a problem.

The Result

Overall, this process worked well. I am going to have an intern make some minor adjustments to the placement of the parking space information and work on a similar process for "angled" parking v. the "parallel parking" mentioned here.

If GIS was consulted before the inventory process began, we could have saved a lot of time of parking enforcement workers filling out an Excel field form and then having to go through this process of geocoding. If Parking Enforcement had worked with our GIS group and used already established GIS field form methodology from the beginning we would have save about a week's time running this geocoding process.

NC

Traffic Sign Inventory ArcUser Winter 2009 Article

Check out my article on the City of Sacramento's Traffic Sign Inventory Project.

I have received numerous calls and email on the I am doing with the City.

NC

ArcObjects 9.3 Help

A few of my students were asking how to navigate the convoluted course of the ArcObject Model Diagrams. You can check under the latest ArcGIS Web Help

http://resources.esri.com/help/9.3/arcgisdesktop/com/vba_start.htm

Hope you find this useful.
NC

City of Redlands and Sign Inventory

A person who read my article in ArcUser sent me this link to what the City of Redlands is doing. They are using Street View of the Google Map to assist them in identifying and locating street signs. Check my Subscribed to links on the right or click here:

City of Redlands Sign Inventory

Rapid Eye Releases Demo Imagery

Rapid Eye launched a series of satellites simultaneously in Aug 2008. Check out some of the galleries and data.

5m multispectral image data (5-band) B,G,R,NearRed, NIR

One of their benefits is they can capture a tremendous quantity of high-res data in a fairly short time.

NC

Ode to a Tree

Well, the City is underway with the Urban Forest Services Tree Inventory. Davey Resources, the consultant on hand to complete the citywide inventory of city-managed trees, has been working for a month now and has about 10% complete.

In the meantime, I have been working on the back-end GIS data management infrastructure setting up the SDE transactional and publication environments using SDE Replication and Synchronization that will eventually hold the tree inventory data as well as developing some processes to create spatial SDE table views that will be used in the work order management side of things using Infor Enterprise Asset Management.

Just finished a Python script to create attribute domains out of the look up tables provided by Davey.

I will update as progress is being made.

NC