Maps and Cartography Archives

List of 30 day map challenge topics by Topi Tjukanov @tjukanov.

November 2021 Map Challenge

October 21, 2021October 20, 2021 by Caitlin Dempsey

Topi Tjukanov has announced a 30-day map challenge starting November 1.

Photo of a drone hovering in the air before a hill with blue skies in the background.

Everything You Need to Know About LiDAR From Drones

September 15, 2021 by Eric van Rees

NV5’s Lukas Fraser discusses drone-based LiDAR: best use cases, how data accuracy is ensured when using drones to capture LiDAR, why LiDAR and high-resolution imagery are complementary technologies, and new market opportunities for topo bathymetric LiDAR.

GIS and Building Safety

July 17, 2021July 14, 2021 by Mark Altaweel

Both during the construction phase, and after, building safety can be better modeled and understood using GIS.

Figure 10: Illustration of Urban Heat Line on LST in ArcGIS Pro.

How to Use ArcGIS Pro to Map Urban Heat Islands

July 11, 2021July 5, 2021 by Jeff Oppong

This ArcGIS Pro tutorial demonstrates how to assess urban heat in a region.

Earth observation data cube and its dimensional axes. Figure: Kopp, S., Becker, P., Doshi, A., Wright, D. J., Zhang, K., & Xu, H. (2019). Achieving the full vision of earth observation data cubes. Data, 4(3), 94. CC BY 4.0.

Datacubes in GIS

June 16, 2021June 7, 2021 by Mark Altaweel

Increasingly, Earth observation (EO) data are stored as datacubes, helping to assist the analytical process.

The image of India on the right is an example of misappropriation of satellite imagery. The image was created from the satellite imagery on the left which shows night lights in India taken in 2003. NOAA manipulated the image to be an RGB Composite of Nighttime Lights Change with red representing 2003 and green representing 1992. The image has since made the rounds periodically on social media purporting to be an image of India on Diwali night.

Deepfake Satellite Imagery

May 12, 2021May 11, 2021 by Mark Altaweel

Deepfake satellite imagery is imagery that has been synthetically to alter or change the appearance of an image, often replacing one scene for another.