After many years of serving the public with global visualizations of Earth’s system processes, we gathered the most frequent questions visitors of our site ask and answered them for you. The FAQs page can be found on the home page and lives here: https://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/faq/. Please look these questions over and see if they answer questions…
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Did you know you can use Excel to visualize raster datasets? If not, follow this short tutorial and find out how. Let’s use the cloud fraction imagery NEO provides for this example. Step 1. Go to the cloud fraction imagery page and choose the CSV for Excel download option from the drop-down at 1.0-degree resolution…
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Applying the right color palette to an image is crucial to conveying the right message to your audience. There are obvious no-nos in map-making like, do not color land and water blue because it may look like your entire map is water. Or, do not color a disaster map green because it may convey a…
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Now that we have finished part one and understand how the color table provided with each dataset on NEO is applied to each grayscale map, let’s focus on creating custom color palettes that are easy for everyone to see. Color-blindness is a common condition that prohibits some individuals (mostly men) from distinguishing between colors. Especially,…
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We have added the NEO color table to a grayscale image, learned how to accommodate the color blind easily with our maps, and now we are ready to build custom color palettes. Adobe has an online color wheel that is helpful to use when surfing through different colors. If you are unsure what colors to…
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There are several companies and organizations that provide spherical projector technology, but the first one I had ever heard of was Science on a Sphere (SOS) created by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Originally envisioned in 1995 by Dr. Alexander “Sandy” MacDonald and later patented in 2005, these Science on a Spheres (and…
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When you are considering which format to download for a NEO image, there are two GeoTIFF format options: GeoTIFF (raster) and GeoTIFF (floating point). This can be confusing at first. Let’s take a look at both examples using the Chlorophyll Concentration dataset to distinguish the two formats. Here is a screenshot showing the Downloads box…
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A Little Background Information on WMS The Web Mapping Service (WMS) protocol has been around since 1999 and gives users the capability to access georeferenced maps via machine-to-machine contact. This means you can connect to a WMS server from a software of your choice that has WMS capabilities and load all or some of the…
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We recently received an email about adding country labels to a NEO image to better understand where certain data points are in the world. Here is one way to add labels to any NEO image in QGIS. QGIS is a free and open-source Geographic Information System. If you do not have QGIS on your machine,…
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– Space Bird Watch System ARTES Programme: Business Applications Activity: Demonstration Project Thematic Areas: Environment, Wildlife and Natural Resources Space Assets: Satellite Navigation Earth Observation In the era of access to huge data resources, advanced analysis and data-to-information processing are essential in the decision-making process. SBWS in the form of friendly web portal, provides advanced…
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