Fodar Earth
FodarEarth™ is an online visualization tool and archive for fodar data. One of the major problems with fodar data is that it creates huge files. Imagine mapping an area of 10 km x 10 km at 10 cm resolution — this creates a DEM and orthophoto that total 70 gigabytes, making it hard to share and requiring a powerful computer to use. FodarEarth solves this problem by only serving you the data within your field of view, such that you can still zoom in to see full detail, but you only get those details you are actually zoomed in on.
So here you can fly in 3D over the earth and see our data in full detail in an efficient streaming environment. No application is required, just a recently updated browser. Powered by Cesium, an interactive 3D viewer can be placed into any web page and viewed by anyone, as seen here.
Rather than one globe that has it all, we are making individual globes that highlight individual projects. In this way, clients or fans can embed these into their own pages and focus their user’s attention to that project. Using Cesium’s tools, we can add annotations and vector data overlays to the globes, with more tools on their way. The globes we create can be made public, like the ones below, or kept private, as many of our mining clients prefer. To highlight our topographic and image data, we usually use a road map as the base image, but note that in the “Data” tab you can change this to a satellite image, and also that we can put any image in as a layer to be flickered on and off.
In April 2017, we mapped the Lake Peters watershed as part of a study the hydrology of the watershed by directly measuring glacier volume change and snow pack volume. We have mapped this area 2-3 times per year for the past three years.
In April 2017, we measured the extent of aufeis on the Kuparuk River for a science team studying it impact on downstream ecology. Note that the topography is very subtle here, so you will have to zoom in closely to see it. We timed this acquisition with the field team’s visit; you can actually see them in the image.
In May 2016 we finished mapping the entire west coast of Alaska. Much of these data were acquired on spec, as Alaska’s coastlines are rapidly changing and our goal is map it all as soon as possible so that we can measure and understand these changes. Here is an example of the level of detail of these data at Cape Krusenstern, home to one our National Parks with a very interesting archeological history. Note that the topography here is very flat, with these old beach ridges only a meter or so in height.
In May 2017, we mapped this section of the road entering Denali National Park which had suffered over the winter. We were able to deliver the data within 2 days of acquisition, to help with their planning efforts. We have mapped this road several times per year over the last several years to help Park staff and engineers.