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About socalgovgis - Michael Carson

Michael Carson, GIS Manager (retired) for the City of Burbank and President of Southern California Government GIS User Group. Currently teaching GIS at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita.

California As An Island Map Exhibit

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, many believed California was a remote island with plenty of gold, free-loving amazons, and strange beasts.

A new exhibit at Cal State Fullerton’s Pollak Library features a selection of maps from the Roy V. Boswell Collection for the History of Cartography, one of the University’s special collections. The exhibit, “California As an Island and Worlds That Never Were,” will be on display Jan. 22 to March 29 in the Salz-Pollak Atrium Gallery.

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NOAA Releases First GOES-16 Image

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released the first image taken by Harris Corporation’s Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) onboard their next-generation weather satellite. The image taken from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-16 (GOES-16) is of Earth’s full western hemisphere with detailed cloud and water features.

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Uber Movement

Uber is providing access to anonymized data from over 2 billion trips to help improve urban planning around the world.  Uber movement provides a new way on how traffic is moving around in your city.  It was designed in partnership with urban planners and transportation professionals.  Tools are included to analyze traffic changes over time.  Check it out!

ubermovement

Thanks goes to Barry Waite for finding this one!

Mapping Building Shadows

Check out this article about mapping building shadows of New York City.  Building shadows were measured using a shadow accumulation technique and the dates of December 21 (winter solstice), June 21 (summer solstice), and September 22 (autumnal equinox) were chosen for the shadow profile.  Shadows can be greatly distorted when they are near the horizon, so all the shadows in the model were estimated from one and a half hours after sunrise and one and a half hours before sunset.

buildingshadows

Thanks goes to Mary Bates from College of the Canyons for finding this article!

CHS Cartographic Collection

52 19th and early 20th century maps of California have been added to the California Historical Society’s new Digital Library. The images represent a sampling of unique or uncommonly held titles ranging geographically from an 1863 map of the copper region of Del Norte County in the north, to a circa 1866 Topographical Map Showing the Locations of the Sutro Tunnel and the Comstock Lode, to a colorful 1913 townsite map of Date City (now called Calipatria) in Imperial County in the south. In between are city, county, mining, real property, water-supply, road, and railroad maps of various localities throughout the state.  Check it out!

calhistsoc