Radio Garden

Radio Garden is an interactive globe that allows visitors to listen to over 8,000 live radio stations from around the world.  When you visit the site, radio stations are loaded and then you will be directed to the radio station closest to your current location.  From there, you can explore other stations around the globe.  Cities with multiple participating stations will have a list appear on the right side of the browser, allowing you to choose which station to listen to.  By selecting the History tab or the Jingles tab, you can explore historic radio broadcasts and station jingles from across time and space.  Check it out!

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Finding and Mapping National Parks

The US National Park Service boasts an extensive, well-designed website that features resources for educators, nature lovers, history enthusiasts, and anyone interested in learning more about the many U.S. national parks and sites. Check out the Find a Park page, which allows you to quickly locate parks and historic sites of interest. Using the interactive map, you can find parks by state and view a variety of statistics about park visitors and land area in each state. You can also conduct a text search to find a particular park. You can also scroll down on the main page to check out a list of fee-free days at national parks.

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Road and Aviation Noise

While helping out someone that was looking for fatal accident data, I ran across a cool map service hosted by the US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics.  Looking at the REST endpoint for their map services, I found the National Transportation Noise Map.  The service description reads:

The National Transportation Noise Map is developed using a 24-hr equivalent sound level (LEQ, denoted by LAeq) noise metric. The results are A-weighted noise levels that represent the approximate average noise energy due to transportation noise sources over the 24 hour period at the defined receptors. This map includes simplified noise modeling and is intended for the tracking of trends, it should not be used to evaluate noise levels in individual locations and/or at specific times. https://maps.bts.dot.gov/noise/

If you click on the link in the description, it will take you to a document that outlines how the noise levels were collected and processed.  A few points about the data:

  • It is a simplified noise model to track trends
  • Flight operations are averaged into a single average annual day
  • Military operations were not included unless they were at a joint-use or commercial airport
  • Helicopter operations were not included
  • Flight track info was available for some airports for the modeling, and for the ones that did not have any flight track info, a straight-in and out procedure was modeled
  • For the road noise model, average annual daily traffic values were used in conjunction with vehicle types and speed, distributed evenly across 24 hours
  • The noise level cutoff of 35 db(A) was used

Adding the image service to ArcMap displayed this in the LA basin area:

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I then changed the color ramp so high noise levels were red and low noise levels were blue.

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Pretty cool … unless you live near LAX!

ArcGIS Earth 1.7 Beta

The ArcGIS Earth 1.7 Beta is now available.  In this release users can look forward to the ability to identify and display metadata and attribute information for map services, image services, and WMS services on the globe, a smoother navigation experience, improved rendering for KML, improved drawing elements, labeling in multiple languages, and a new startup experience for first time users. Additionally, administrators will have the ability to customize startup criteria to meet the needs of their organization.

Click below to find out more and how to sign up for beta testing.

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Future Communities Forum

SCAG’s Future Communities Forum, a unique gathering of researchers, business and civic leaders, and policymakers from Southern California and around the world, will showcase how technology and open data are being used to solve common challenges.

The forum will be held Wednesday, May 2 from 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Renaissance Indian Wells Resort & Spa.  Click below for more info and to register.

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