Hello, and welcome to GeoSpatial Stream. I’m your host, Todd Danielson, and today’s Lead Sponsor is Trimble Geospatial Division.
Today’s Top Story is, again, Climate Change. In late September at the United Nations Climate Summit in New York, U.S. President Barack Obama announced a new set of technologies to help vulnerable populations worldwide strengthen their climate resilience. Among the new tools is the public availability of 30-meter Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data on a near-global scale to generate the most-complete high-resolution digital topographic database of Earth.
Immediately following Obama’s announcement, Esri announced that it will enhance its existing World Elevation Map to include the new data.
Obama also announced a new Executive Order requiring Federal agencies to factor climate resilience into the design of their international development programs and investments. And here’s a clip from a video created for the Climate Summit. I’ve posted the entire video on GeoSpatial Stream, so check that out:
That was today’s Top Story. I’ll be back with more news after this brief message.
Also at the UN Climate Summit, world leaders announced new pledges to restore more than 30 million hectares of degraded forest lands. The commitments come from Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guatemala, and Uganda, among others, and more than doubled the number of hectares contributing to achieving the Bonn Challenge—a global goal to restore 150 million hectares of deforested and degraded lands by 2020.
Scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey developed a new mapping tool, the Pedestrian Evacuation Analyst, to estimate how long it would take for someone to travel on foot out of a tsunami-hazard zone. The GIS software extension allows users to create maps showing travel times out of hazard zones and determine the number of people that may or may not have enough time to evacuate.
In industry headlines, exactEarth won a contract from the government of Canada to provide advanced satellite Automatic Identification System data services, augmenting an existing contract that had been in place since 2012 with the Canadian Space Agency and Department of National Defence.
Bentley Systems acquired BLUERIDGE Analytics Inc., provider of SITEOPS site-design optimization software that uses cloud-based computing techniques to enable the exploration of engineering alternatives and their costs.
And Innovyze announced that the San Antonio River Authority and the San Antonio Emergency Operations Center installed FloodWorks to help emergency responders plan for and react to life-threatening storms.
For today’s Final Thought, here’s a clip from the keynote address I recorded at this year’s GeCo in the Rockies event in Grand Junction, Colorado. It’s an interesting look at how location problems can be solved in new ways:
That’s it for this broadcast, I’m Todd Danielson, and this … was your GeoSpatial Stream.
