6 replies to this topic

[David Medeiros]

I need to download a small selection of data for a single topo quad (Jim Jam Ridge). This used to be pretty easy using the now shuttered Seamless Viewer. I could delineate an area and select all of the various extracts I needed. The results mostly worked as expected.

Well Seamless is finally dead and gone and I'm now forced to sue the National Map Viewer which looks to work in a similar fashion, albeit with more steps (progress right?). The problem is most of the files I extract are broken (GeoTIFS don't seem to work in Arc across the board), or take waaaaay too long to get (NHD data may take 2 days to be extracted fr a single quad!), and Topos are GeoPDFs which don't work with ArcGIS.

I want to know two things: 1) am I the only person who, if the National Map Viewer was a person, would be convicted of homicide by now? and 2) do you know where I can get free USGS topos as GeoTIFs or NHD extracts by quad?

[aug_aug]

http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/

Check this out, there is a DRG layer under data sets, not to mention historic imagery and lots of other stuff...

[aug_aug]

BTW, I would also like to eliminate whatever bureaucrat signed off on proprietary GeoPDF for topos...

[SteveR]

David, two other good sources for topo maps are these:

http://libremap.org/
http://fsgeodata.fs..../rastergateway/

The latter source only covers quadrangles that include US national forests (which would include Jim Jam Ridge), and is likely to be more recent and accurate.

Forest Service maps don't include vegetation, but for some forests you can find that as a separate shapefile. When a vegetation shapefile isn't available, we extract the vegetation layer from the USGS quadrangle geoTIFF using Photoshop, clean it up, and merge it into the Forest Service map.

Steve Richardson
2i3D Stereo Imaging

[redbeard]

Not to mention you could get the vegetation from a dataset such as usgs NLCD or the Corine land cover in europe. The folks at development seed used GLOBCOVER did when creating their latest terrain maps.

[SteveR]

Not to mention you could get the vegetation from a dataset such as usgs NLCD or the Corine land cover in europe. The folks at development seed used GLOBCOVER did when creating their latest terrain maps.

Thank you for that link, Redbeard! It's also a superior source for seamless digital elevation models.

Whoever wrote the interface, though, didn't understand the notation for arcseconds. We're given the opportunity to download 1 inch and 1/3rd inch DEMs.

Steve

[Dennis McClendon]

I might be an accessory to the crime. I got back from NACIS and immediately tried to use the National Map Viewer. I wanted to just take a look at the shaded relief for the Chicago region without any modern-day culture on top. No button for turn off all layers, so I spent 15 minutes drilling down all the sublayers and turning them off. And still the raster map is displayed on top, even when I rearrange layers.

Some real UX problems there.