EVS-Islands

I have had a few visitors hunting for information about the Caspian Sea.  Typically, I send them to Caspian Environment.  This site has loads of great data and links about the Caspian Sea.

What I have managed to do some months ago was to digitize most of the Caspian Sea shoreline at EVS precision.  My shoreline makes the best currently available (1:1,000,000) appear crude.  My EVS shoreline mirrors cloud free Landsat ETM+ 2000 imagery shorelines.  Most of the digitizing was done at 1:12,500 scale.

This post contains Marplot maps of two interesting areas within the Caspian Sea - The Miankaleh Peninsula and Gorgan Bay and the Apsheron Peninsula, the location of Baku, AZ.  I have displayed 1:2,000,000 scale shoreline, which I call WVS.  These are compared to map images that display EVS shorelines.

Enjoy!

Labels: Caspian Sea, EVS, map, shoreline

Posted by Mr Minton at 3/08/2007 06:50:00 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

Caspian Sea - Landsat Image

Last year I digitized much of the shoreline of the Caspian Sea at EVS level of detail (>1:125,000). To date all but a 1/4 of the lake is complete. I still have the mouth of the Volga River to finish and that is a complex task at best.

Volga River Delta - Landsat Image

Once the Volga Delta is complete, I will have an extremely detailed shoreline map of the Caspian Sea. That might be awhile. The delta of the Volga is an dynamic and complex geographic feature to digitize and map.

Volga River Delta - Detail of the Large Islands

The shortcut would be to digitize the approximate shape of the larger delta islands as seen in the above image.

Volga River Delta - Thousands of Very Small Islands

However, to remain true to my quest, transforming World Shorelines into EVS scale, I would have to digitize each of these very small marsh islands so that when finished they would form the very large marsh islands in the image before the above.

That is another story. As I promised in the title, this post is about free map files. While mapping the shorelines of the world's largest lake, I learned that there is an group out of Baku, Azerbaijan that publishes map files. Unfortunately, their shorelines were digitized from a 1:1,000,000 scale map series and were no help in my EVS shoreline efforts. However, they did offer an intriguing map file. It is in .shp format which I converted into a .dat file (drops right into Marplot).

Caspian Sea - Marplot Map with Bathymetric Contours

Voila! Caspian Sea Bathymetric Contours. The Caspian Environment Program offers a number of interesting map files of the Caspian Sea, and best of all . . . the files are FREE! Go ahead and snag some free data.

Enjoy!

Labels: bathymetry, Caspian Sea, EVS, Landsat, map, Marplot

Posted by Mr Minton at 3/08/2007 06:45:00 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

14,287 Seamounts

This all began with a request to locate an obscure undersea feature, that I still haven't been able to locate. It led to a PDF file that discussed the above dataset which was compiled by an outfit called The Sea Around Us (www.seaaroundus.org). Using ETOP2 data and an ARC GIS process the researchers came up with this dataset of 14,287 seamounts. My favorite aspect of this research is their results are FREE and available for download. I downloaded the data, placed it into Marplot and what you see is what I got. Pretty nifty.

Enjoy!

Labels: data, Sea Around Us, seamounts

Posted by Mr Minton at 3/07/2007 06:57:00 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

This island is located off of the coast of Oman. At first glance it appears to be nothing more than a desert island that affords a difficult existence to it's inhabitants. As you zoom in, an airbase shows up at the northern end of the island. To the west of the airfield is a small town. One more zoom in and the airfield is now quite distinct. It turns out the airbase was built and used by the RAF during the waning years of colonialism. The RAF retained possession for some time, well into the 70's, the base was being used by RAF pilots. During the 80's and 90's the base was used by RAF Omani, RAF and USAF. Today it is an important staging base of operation for missions into Iraq and even as far away as Afghanistan. The website, Global Security, has an informative article on Masirah. There are a couple of other links that provide detail information about the island. One by a person that visited the island recently and the other by a group of freelance explorers that gives thorough information about two recent trips to the island.

What initially looked rather innocent and unimportant, turned out to be just the opposite. Islands are funny brutes. You think you've got them all figured out and then they fool you. What should be an out-of-the-way island inhabited by fishermen, is a staging area for the war in Iraq. Go figure!

I used Landsat imagery for the majority of my mapping efforts, but did use Digital Globe imagery to complete the newer features along the coast and at the airfield. The ground cover is classified as EVS Land Bare. I did not map the coast of Oman. If that coast fascinates you, check out the Landsat imagery. It shows the Omani coast.

Enjoy!

Labels: Digital Globe, EVS, Google, Indian Ocean, island, Landsat, map, Oman, RAF, RAFO, USAF

Posted by Mr Minton at 3/06/2007 12:28:00 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post