Latest Contributions by ReneeBrandt

Yeah!  It is finally here.  A MOOC for all imagery and remote sensing enthusiasts.   This brand new, online 6 week free MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on Imagery starts on September 7 th .  If you’ve ever wanted more real world experience working with imagery, this MOOC is for you.  Learn practical application of imagery through hands on lessons and video demonstrations that lead you through multiple industry examples and show you how easy it can be to use imagery and remotely sensed data to solve some of the toughest challenges we face today.   Sign up for Imagery MOOC ... View more

The Esri 2016 User Conference has drawn to a close, but what a wonderful, action packed week it was.  I was fortunate to meet a lot of you when you stopped by the imagery island in the showcase, and heard many compliments for the team on the webinars we put on over the last year. The UC always has so many sessions and great things to do, that it is impossible to catch everything.  So here is a recap of my favorite plenary sessions that demonstrate using ArcGIS imagery technology to solve various problems you may be encountering today. Imagery and Drones | Esri Video -- Esri imagery product manager Peter Becker talking about multiple topics including: the New Polar Landsat services available through ArcGIS Online; New Classification tools in ArcGIS Pro, and the New Drone2Map app.  This video opens with a great imagery video narrated by Lauren Bennett.  Kalmar County Museum | Esri Video -- Kalmar County Museum archaeologists demonstrate how they are using imagery and ArcGIS imagery capabilities to uncover details that were buried long ago. The Living Atlas | Esri Video -- Esri's Deane Kensok discusses content in the Living Atlas from Esri, and our customers and partners.  He also discusses updates to the World Imagery basemap. You should have also received the new ArcGIS Imagery Book​ in your conference materials.  Don't forget to visit the companion electronic website, which includes all the learn lessons and over 150 links to gorgeous imagery, videos, storymaps and more.  Thanks for reading, and it was great seeing you again this year at UC! ... View more

Landsat Polar image services.  Intrigued, I opened my email the other day, and was treated to some of the most gorgeous imagery of the Arctic and Antarctic I had ever seen.  Not only did the email contain the images you’ll see in this blog, but also links to two new applications I could use to explore the imagery in the regions and easily share it with others. Let me give you an overview of the two new polar applications, Landsat Arctic and Landsat Antarctic, as I’m sure you are going to want to explore and share the information you find. Esri’s Landsat Polar Applications Figure 3: Spectral profile view in Antarctic App Figure 4: Time tool with cloud filter in Arctic App Above, you can see screenshots of the Landsat Arctic and Antarctic applications, and some of the analysis tools built into the application. These applications support both visualization and analysis of the Arctic and Antarctic regions using polar stereographic projections required for working at these latitudes.   Using them, you can easily access the latest Landsat polar scenes without the need to store, compile, and process the source data onto your local machine. You have full access to the temporal multispectral, panchromatic, and pan-sharpened Landsat scenes. In addition, you’ll notice the variety of easy to use analysis tools we’ve included in the left hand side of the application.  These make it very easy to explore the imagery using custom band combinations, time profiles, and spectral profiles. The Spectral profile functionality plots the spectrum of all bands for a desired selected pixel and The Time profile provides a scalable timeline with the functionality to filter out clouds, simultaneously. These applications also include new Facebook and Twitter links. Try them out. When you share the image you are looking at, the shared link will bring a user back to the same location and state of the image analysis that you were at. It’s a great capability for sharing the information and imagery that you find interesting with others.  Landsat Polar Services The Landsat polar services are available for use within the ArcGIS Online platform and are also part of the Living Atlas. These Landsat services and apps are open for public access. They can be directly used in ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS for Desktop, ArcGIS Online web and mobile applications, as well as a wide range of applications that utilize the GeoREST Image Services API. The services are sourced from the scenes that remain in their original UTM projections, but have been published as a services with a default polar projection. All reprojection and mosaicking is being performed on the fly. When viewing them in ArcGIS Online it is optimum to use the Arctic Polar Ocean Basemap / Antarctic Imagery Basemap. Other polar projections may be used within their useful limits. These services can be used to support the work glaciologists and other scientists want to do in the polar regions including:  reducing uncertainties of ice sheet mass balance estimates, providing a streamlined way to investigate associated sea level rise, refinement of ice sheet models, measurement of ice surface displacement/motion, ice-sheet topography, tidal effects over floating ice, ice sheet surface albedo, estimate of surface melt rates, ice velocity, etc. Accessing the various Polar services Figure 1: Arctic Service Figure 2: Antarctic service (Full view with NDSI Colorized: Blue regions represent snow, water. Yellow-green regions are cloudy, rocky areas.) The Arctic and Antarctic image services are separate and each is split into multispectral, panchromatic and pansharpened imagery. Currently the services contain all scenes collected since January 2015. In the Arctic, the GLS scenes that cover the Epochs of 2010, 2005, 2000, 1990, 1975 have also been added. The image services are updated daily to add new scenes as soon as they become available. Due to the fact that the Landsat satellite passes over the poles multiple times a day there is extensive temporal coverage. In the summer time when there is light and little cloud there is often a scene every day. Naturally in the winter months there is very little coverage. Below is a visual representation of each of the 6 different Landsat Polar Services available, along with hyperlinks directing to them.              Landsat Arctic Views                     Landsat Arctic Pansharpened              Landsat Arctic Panchromatic               Landsat Antarctic Views               Landsat Antarctic Pansharpened         Landsat Antarctic Panchromatic​ Similar to the Landsat World services, the polar services have various raster functions to render different band combinations and indices like Natural Color with DRA​​, Geology with DRA​, Color Infrared with DRA​, Normalized Difference Moisture Index Colorized​, and Panchromatic with DRA Sharpened​. Two new raster functions Normalized Difference Snow index Colorized​ and Normalized Difference Snow Index Raw​ have also been introduced. Similar functions are available for the Antarctic service, as well. For more information, see the Arctic Maps , Antarctic Maps or Landsat Community groups on ArcGIS Online. You can also access the Landsat World Web App from Unlock Earth’s Secrets. Data Source The imagery in these services is sourced from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The data for these services reside on the Landsat Public Datasets hosted by Amazon on S3 storage. ... View more

Hi Everyone, We had so many questions from the Eyes on the World imagery webinar, that it took us a few weeks to answer them all. I'm attaching a document with answers to all the questions submitted.  In addition, if you didn't have a chance to join us live, a recording of the webinar is posted at the link below: go.esri.com/imageryseries​ We want to thank you for participating in the webinar, and your interest in ArcGIS imagery capabilities. ... View more

Have you been eagerly waiting to use the new Sentinel 2 imagery from the European Space Agency in ArcGIS? The wait is over! Esri has enhanced ArcGIS to simplify the use of free, global Sentinel 2 imagery. Now the full 13 band multispectral and temporal information from Sentinel 2 imagery can be quickly accessed for visualization, interpretation and analysis. Sentinel 2 imagery is of value in a range of applications including forestry, agriculture, land resource management and environmental monitoring. This is exciting news since the Sentinel 2 data compliments Landsat data accessible through ArcGIS Online. You can now easily add Sentinel 2 scenes into ArcMap 10.4 and ArcGIS Pro 1.3 and immediately gain access to the wide range of bands combinations and indices combing the 10m, 20m and 60m spectral bands. Using a hot fix that same access can be applied in ArcMap 10.3.1. The resulting image can be viewed and analyzed using the advanced image processing and analysis tools available in ArcGIS. These include both pixel and segment based, supervised and unsupervised classifiers and can be expanded using python raster functions accessing NumPy and SciPy. Esri has also released a workflow that enables a large collection of Sentinel 2 scenes to be quickly served as dynamic image services. These enable the full information content of Sentinel 2 to be accessible to a wide range of desktop, web and mobile applications, with all processing being applied on the fly by ArcGIS Server. ArcGIS is ready to easily manage, analyze and disseminate the imagery and applications across institutions, organizations and new startup businesses, that are focused on land monitoring, maritime, climate and security.   Here are the links you need!!! Workflow to create Sentinel 2 Mosaic Dataset​ Patch for ArcGIS 10.3.1​ See this short video for an example of using an automated script to build and configure a mosaic dataset of your Sentinel 2 imagery. Sentinel 2 Color Infrared and Natural Color Images ... View more

Wow, we had a record turnoff for the Imagery All Access Pass Webinar last month, and over 100 questions.  We've consolidated them and removed the duplicate questions, and here is the attached document with more questions than you knew you had on image management, and most importantly, the answers!  If you missed the webinar, you can still watch it by going to this link, and clicking on the title in the previous webinar section:  Imagery Webinar Series ... View more

Attend a free, live training session on using Multidimensional Scientific Data with ArcGIS! Esri LTS (Live Training Session)​ March 24, 2016 9:00 a.m., 11:00 a.m., and 3:00 p.m. (PDT) Scientific datasets produced by earth observation systems are widely used for monitoring and modeling physical, chemical, and biological phenomena at a global scale over ocean, atmosphere, or land. These multivariate multidimensional raster datasets, often delivered in specialized formats such as netCDF, GRIB, and HDF, have traditionally been complex to manage. Esri ArcGIS software now provides scientists, analysts and researchers with new tools to easily organize, visualize, process, and share multidimensional raster datasets.  Join this live training session and learn the new ways ArcGIS can help you work with this datasets. ... View more

Great News!  ArcGIS Full Motion Video (FMV) is now here!  Do you need to visualize and analyze video from drones, UAVs, UASs, manned aircraft, GoPros, surveillance systems, or video cameras?  If you are an existing ArcGIS for Desktop customer, and want to work with streaming or recorded video data, FMV is a simple to install add-in.  If you are not using ArcGIS for Desktop yet, get a free trial of both. For more information: Check out the product webpage at www.esri.com/fmv  Recorded, free training seminar on FMV FMV 1.3 is now available! | ArcGIS Blog ... View more

Hi Everyone, Fast, accurate imagery over the web!!  Have you been following the news about Esri releasing the patent on LERC as Open Source and working with NASA on MRF?  Our own imagery product manager, Peter Becker​ was recently interviewed by GCN about the impact these technologies will have on image compression, accuracy and performance.  https://gcn.com/blogs/emerging-tech/2016/01/nasa-esri-image-storage.aspx For more detailed information and links, refer back to this ArcGIS blog Storing large volumes of imagery and rasters in the cloud | ArcGIS Blog and comment us back when you try it.  We'd love to hear about your results. Thanks! Renee ... View more

The imagery team just posted a blog on the LERC technology we released today for making it fast, accurate and easy to share imagery and raster data over the web. The new approach to data compression enables you to set a tolerance for how much the compressed values can change from the original values. We call the algorithm that does this LERC (Limited Error Raster Compression).  Using LERC, you can set a tolerance of 10 cm when you compress the data, and the result is a dataset that is compressed as much as possible while remaining true to that 10cm tolerance that you set.  You can also set the tolerance to 0 which makes the compression lossless. In most cases LERC provides better lossless compression than traditional lossless compression methods such as LZW and deflate. Check out this blog post which gives you all the details, Storing large volumes of data in the cloud​ for more information.  You can access LERC from our GIthub repository. Adding the link to the Press Release which has some additional information ... View more

Hi Imagery Enthusiasts! I recently reviewed the below article, storymap and application that I thought you may be interested in.  Creating an Oasis in the Desert:  Lake Havasu City, Arizona, 1911​ -- Article by Dr. Joseph Kerski that shows how the Lake Havasu City landscaped has changed using imagery with ArcGIS Online and Landsat Look tools Gold mining in Suriname StoryMap by the Amazon (rainforest) Conservation Team -- interesting article on the expansion of mining activity and how they are using imagery to monitor and manage it. Satellite Map Application  Want to see how much stuff is in space right now?  This application provides a high performance 3d display of ALL man-made satellites orbiting the Earth. If you have a story about a project you are working on, email me, and I'll include it in the next Imagery Examples post. Thanks! Renee Brandt rbrandt@esri.com ... View more

The FMV team is hosting a free Esri Live Training Seminar (LTS) on Thursday, October 22nd.  If you work with videos captured by UAVs, drones, UASs, orbital sensors, vehicle-mounted or handheld cameras, or other means, attend this session to learn how you can use FMV to exploit this video inside ArcGIS. Sign up for the session here:  Esri Training | Live Training Seminar: Get Started with ArcGIS Full Motion Video ... View more