Convert TRRM Real Time Binary File into ESRI ASCII

Seven simple steps for converting TRMM binary to ASCII grid using MATLAB

Step1:

 %Open TRMM realtime binary file

trmmFile = fopen('E:\TrmmBinary Processing\3B42RT.2012.03.27.09z.bin', 'rb');  

Step2:

%Move file pointer to the begining of  file

frewind(trmmFile);

Step3:

%Read TRMM value from the binary file having 1140 rows and 480 columns

precipitation = fread(trmmFile, [1440,480], 'float32','b');

Step4:

%Shift precipitation by 90 degree to relate data with equator

precipitation = rot90(precipitation);

 Step5:

%Assign ESRI ASCII GRID HEADER

%After rotaion by 90 degree ncols changed into 1440 from 480 and nrows

%changed into 480 from 1440

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We will miss the "father of GIS"

Dr. Roger Tomlinson has passed away. Tomlinson is generally recognized as the "father of GIS.” He is the visionary geographer who conceived and developed the first GIS for use by the Canada Land Inventory in the early 1960s.  This and continuing contributions led the Canadian government to give him its highest civilian award, the Order of Canada, in 2001.  Text for that award reads, “he pioneered its uses worldwide to collect, manage, and manipulate geographical data, changing the face of geography as a discipline.”

Tomlinson tells the story of how this came to be.  In the early 1960s he was working as a photo interpreter for Spartan Air Services in Canada.  They had a contract to identify the best location for a tree plantation in Kenya.  They turned to their young geographer Tomlinson and asked him to develop a methodology.  He tried various manual methods for overlaying various environmental, cultural, and economic variables, but all were too costly.  He turned to computers and found the solution.  Subsequently he sold this approach to the Canada Land Inventory that had the responsibility of using data to assist the government in its land use planning activities.  His GIS approach reduced the task from three years and eight million Canadian dollars to several weeks and two million dollars.
 

He went on to serve the community in many ways.  He chaired the International Geographical Union’s GIS Commission for 12 years, where he pioneered the concepts of worldwide geographical data availability. He is a past president of the Canadian Association of Geographers a recipient of its rare Canadian Award for Service to the Profession.
 
Other awards followed including the James R. Anderson Medal of Honor for Applied Geography (1995) and the Robert T. Aangeenbrug Distinguished Career Award (2005) from the American Association of Geographers.  He was the first recipient of the Aangeenbrug award and also the first recipient of ESRI’s Lifetime Achievement Award (1997). National Geographic gave him its rare Alexander Graham Bell Award for exceptional contributions to geographic research (2010). He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the recipient of multiple honorary doctorates – in addition to his own PhD from University College London.  

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Call for Proposals, Presentations and Workshops: Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial 2014, Portland, Oregon (FOSS4G 10th Anniversary)

FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) is pleased to invite proposals for workshops, papers, and presentations for its 2014 conference to be held in Portland, Oregon, USA from September 8th to 13th.

The annual FOSS4G conference is the largest global gathering for all those currently or potentially working with open source geospatial software. It brings together a mix of developers, users, decision makers and observers from a broad spectrum of organizations and fields of operation for six days of workshops, presentations, discussions, and cooperation.

Conference Dates

Sep 8th-9th: Workshops

Sep 10th-12th: Main Conference

                                                              Sep 13th: Code Sprint

For more information or to keep up to date on news from FOSS4G 2014, follow @foss4g on Twitter, subscribe to our announcements list, or contact: foss4g2014-info@osgeo.org.

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Call for Papers: 45th Annual South Dakota State Geography Convention

45th Annual South Dakota State Geography Convention  March 20-21, 2014 in the Volstorff Ballroom in the South Dakota State University Student Union, Brookings, SD, USA

Student poster and paper abstracts are now being accepted until March 1, 2014!

Please contact: Josh Bucher, Geography Club President, email: joshua.bucher@sdstate.edu

Events
J.R. Smith Memorial Geography Bowl
Thursday: Social at The Ram Pub, Main Street Brookings,SD
Student Poster and Paper Presentations

Friday: Awards Banquet at McCrory Gardens Center & Keynote Speaker; AAG President Julie Winkler
Convention events will begin at 9AM on March 20!

For more information, contact:
Josh Bucher
Geography Club President
joshua.bucher@sdstate.edu

Featured Speakers
* Marc Simard, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, Pasadena, CA
* John Fraser Hart, University of Minnesota
* John Hudson, Northwestern University
* Derek Alderman, University of Tennessee-Knoxville
* Margaret Pearce, University of Kansas
* Forrest Wilkerson, Minnesota State University-Mankato
* Hilary Hungerford, South Dakota State University
* Lara Prihodko, Geospatial Science Center of Excellence, South Dakota State University
* Gray Tappan, U.S. Geological Survey/EROS Data Center, Sioux Falls, SD
Map: https://mapsengine.google.com/map/edit?mid=zYDrN4TX_sg8.k3DVcGcbjMU0

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Top 20 Research Institutes in Remote Sensing

A recent study conducted by Yanhua Zhuang et al. (2013) reported the top 20 research institutes in remote sensing using bibliometric analysis on publications published during 1991-2010 in the remote sensing field. 

Oho, Satellites are making RS research interesting!

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Impact of Google Maps API v2 shutdown on Openlayers base layers and a easy solution

Finally on Nov 19 2013, Google shut down Google Maps v2 API, which was depreciated in May 19 2010 but was working continuously Nov 19. I was aware of version depreciation, but I procrastinate to upgrade till last minute because of working on too many other things. While checking my Web map (built on Openlayers, Geoserver and Google Maps as base layers (Google Maps API v2) on Nov 20, I saw two map controls one from Openlayers and other from Google Maps API also noticed that map application was unresponsive.

Looking around I found easy steps to fix it without major change in the code-

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New 2014 GIS Internship/Jobs Opportunities

1) 2014 Summer Opportunities: Yosemite National Park, CA
These four summer positions involve a complete remeasurement of the 25.6 ha Yosemite Forest Dynamics Plot, located near Crane Flat in old-growth sugar pine/white fir forest. The plot burned at generally low to moderate severity in the 2013 Rim Fire. Tasks include revisiting each tree and snag; recording mortalities, ingrowth, and newly fallen wood; measuring scorch and snag heights; and mapping shrub patches, down CWD and areas of the forest floor that did not burn. Other tasks include measuring fuel consumption along fixed transects, installing and measuring dendrometers, and collecting data from associated instrumentation. Mortality checks require hatchet use. Staff will supervise students and volunteers.
Qualifications: Previous experience taking vegetation research data, working safely in challenging environments, and following complex data collection protocols is required. Candidates should demonstrate the ability to solve problems and to work both independently and in teams of two or three. Work will involve moving through sometimes steep, rocky terrain with delicate and expensive equipment, as well as the ability to carry up to 15 kg of additional gear. Work experience in post-fire forests strongly desired, as is some knowledge of western flora, tree pathogens, and forest insects. Staff must have a driver’s license and a Wilderness First Aid/CPR certification (or higher) valid until August 31, 2014 (if you are not certified, please include your plans for certification in your cover letter). Other: Practical experience in the operation and maintenance of computer, electronic, and mechanical equipment; familiarity with a variety of software and instrumentation; and experience with periods of outdoor living are all positives.

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Free Old Geography Books Available for Kindle and Nook

Free Geography eBooks from 18th and 19th Century- Available in Kindle and Nook formats.  Click and follow the link to download the ebooks.

Commercial Geography

A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges

Jacques W. Redway, Published:1903

Geography and Plays
Gertrude Stein, Published:1922

A Historical Geography of the British Colonies
Vol. V, Canada—Part I, Historical
Charles Prestwood Lucas, Published:1901

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MAGIC GIS 2014 Symposium

The Mid-America GIS Symposium, MAGIC 2014, is quickly approaching and will be held April 27 to May 1 at the Westin Crown Center April 27 - May 1, 2014 in Kansas City, Missouri.

GIS covers such a broad range of subjects, applications and types of people that use it, that developing a conference program that meets everyone's needs is a challenging task. Even more challenging is an attendee trying to figure out exactly which sessions or topics will be most interesting and helpful. MAGIC 2014 is intended to focus the content of the presentation options into a program specifically geared to each attendee's needs.

Your 2014 Program Committee is working very hard to bring you the best Symposium yet. If you have ideas or comments, please send them to the Symposium Chair.

Anyone is free to submit an abstract to MAGIC 2014.
Submissions should be received by December 6, 2013.
You will be notified by January 20, 2014 if your presentation was accepted.

Read all about the MAGIC Symposium here:
http://www.magicgis.org/magic/symposiums/2014/
Please submit your abstract proposal online at the MAGIC Web Site here:
http://www.magicgis.org/magic/symposiums/2014/abstract.cfm#top

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US address correction, address verification, and geocoding using ZP4, Google Geocoding API, and Bing Maps API

From a couple of months, I have been involved in Tax certificate address verification project for educational purpose; I have around 8 million parcel address  collected and maintained by different tax collecting agencies in various format for instance COBOL ,CSV, ASCII, Excel , and some are even in pdf for their tax districts. 

My task was to find the address from those different files and export them in CSV with corrected standard USPS address format (STREET, CITY, STATE, and ZIP) to make Universal Tax File format for data analysis by removing unwanted data from the address rows.  Initially, I used ZP4 software, it has “official United States Postal Service data files on a single DVD-ROM that provides a powerful tool for automatically determining the correct mailing address, ZIP + 4 code, and mail carrier route number for any location in the United States”, works fine for few address (about 15%) which has proper USPS standard address format. The real challenge starts with remaining   85% of the parcel address that has no USPS standard address format (either address without city and zip information or the vacant parcel lots that cannot accept mails and therefore not entered in the USPS mailing address database).

Looking around the Web, Google leaves me with tons of pages entitled on address correction and validation including close source and open source software APIs, tools, and datasets, but hard to figure out which method works for my project in terms of address quality(address was poorly written), quantity(8 million addresses), and resources (cheap and easy to implement) . After spending few days here and there, finally I come up with a solution that works for me, an integrated address correction strategy using ZP4, Google Geocoding API, and Bing Maps API.

Here, I am going to share how ZP4, Google and Bing integration makes my job easy and relatively cheap to validate and correct US physical street addresses.

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