Hello, and welcome to GeoSpatial Stream. I’m your host, Todd Danielson, and today’s Lead Sponsor is Exelis Visual Information Solutions.
Today’s Top Story is Atmospheric Rivers. NOAA recently began the CalWater 2015 project, which is flying planes, sailing ships and setting up ground stations to monitor atmospheric rivers, which are narrow and intense moisture-bearing winter storms that deliver much of the water vapor associated with major storms along the U.S. West Coast.
In California, it’s critical to understand if precipitation arrives as snow, which can store water in snowpack, or rain, which can increase flood risk.
According to Allen White, a research meteorologist at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory and CalWater 2015 mission scientist, “Improving our understanding of atmospheric rivers will help us produce better forecasts of where they will hit and when, and how much rain and snow they will deliver.”
Another element of the project is studying aerosols, which can come from local sources or remote continents, and can influence western U.S. precipitation and how storms develop. The varied use of sensors and technologies is expected to be an important factor.
Adds White, “It is rare that such an array of observing platforms are devoted to a field campaign. It’s both an exciting opportunity and a challenge to coordinate and make optimal use of these assets.”
That was today’s Top Story. I’ll be back with more news after this brief message.
USGS released the Groundwater Toolbox, a new method to analyze groundwater and surface-water hydrologic data. The GIS-driven graphical and mapping interface brings together several analysis methods previously developed by USGS and the Bureau of Reclamation. Each of the methods uses daily streamflow data automatically retrieved from the USGS National Water Information System for more than 26,000 stream gage sites across the United States. In addition to streamflow data, the Toolbox facilitates the retrieval of groundwater-level and precipitation time-series data from the NWIS database.
Esri released ArcGIS 10.3, and since any new ArcGIS release is a major development, and this broadcast is all about video, here’s a clip from Sud Menon, Esri’s director of software development and engineering:
In other industry headlines, Bentley Systems released Bentley Map SELECTseries 4, which brings engineering and geospatial data closer together through improved interoperability with Esri File Geodatabase, Oracle 12c, CityGML, Bing Maps and hybrid point-cloud and vector workflow support.
URISA named Wendy Peloquin as its Young Professional of the Year in recognition of her contributions as part of URISA’s Vanguard Cabinet.
And MDA’s Information Systems Group announced a strategic partnership with PCI Geomatics that introduces a solution to streamline access to synthetic aperture radar imagery for Geomatica 2014 users.
For today’s Final Thought, here’s a clip of me at a recent conference.
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I’m Todd Danielson, and this … was your GeoSpatial Stream.
