We’ve recently added to our library the 2009 1m Color Imagery for the State of California. This data makes a great addition to any California project you may be working on. Let us know if you have a requirement for this type of data.
Thanks!
The Downside of “Free” Maps and charts are the lifeblood of the oil and gas industry and most petroleum executives crave the ability to visualize exploration maps in a dashboard format. The advent of free applications such as Google Earth has made complex imagery available to everyone, and while this online tool has raised awareness of the “power of the image,” it have also created confusion. For example, one cannot judge the precision, vintage, spatial accuracy or resolution of a given image merely by inspection. “Where is that well we drilled last year?” you might reasonably ask. Having the answer to critical questions is essential before putting a map into the wild, lest you run the risk of losing a deal because of lack of due diligence. For the casual user of Google Earth, these are not concerns and therefore not talked about much. As professionals, though, we must ask these questions.
A picture is worth a thousand words
Virtually any source map can be scanned and tied to geographic coordinates to form an imagery data source. For imagery data to be useful in a Geographic Information System, however, it must be tied to coordinates and overlaid with other data such oil well or pipeline locations. Explorationists commonly use imagery in the form of an air photo, topographic map, or satellite image to add a sense of “ground truth” to their maps. Points, lines, and polygons in isolation simply do not convey the same sense of truth, even though they may be precisely placed. A picture is worth a thousand words. Given an air photo, an oil company executive can instantly see the location of wells and other infrastructure. The euphoria this creates is undeniable, but sometimes misplaced unless one has confidence in the underlying process that was used to acquire and process the data.
The potentially high cost of “free”
There are several “gotchas” associated with imagery and many points along the way where errors can be introduced. Free data sources do not provide sufficient information about an image, such as its production date and quality. Where does the recent imagery start and old imagery stop? If you zoom out in Google Earth, for example, you can see many strips of data of varying quality, color schemes, and vintage. Such information is critical for exploration companies. In addition, free map services tend to have updated data primarily in urban areas, because that’s what most people care about. Not so in the oil and gas industry where our infrastructure tends to be located in rural locations.
Data overload
Imagery data can quickly fill up local storage space, even on very large computers. As data resolution increases (and engineers always want the highest resolution data available) imagery fills up disk space exponentially faster. A consequence is that 30 centimeter resolution data requires nine times more storage space than the standard one meter resolution data of just a few years ago. This trend is unlikely to change.
Because different client applications require data in different formats, on today’s servers you’ll find multiple versions of the same data in different formats just burning up disk space. Imagery management quickly becomes a mess when dealing in terabytes and IT staff spends more and more time documenting inventory, allocating server space, and updating ever larger databases when they could be focusing on revenue enhancing activities.
Third party services have evolved to address these problems, taking on the tasks of maintaining the expanding imagery database so that it can be streamed directly to oil and gas applications. For now, this involves loading the various imagery data sets and establishing web services that client applications can consume. Clients can offload internal proprietary imagery to a third party vendor and have that data streamed back into the company. This web service reduces the burden on corporate IT, saving time and money.
The future of imagery
In the future, organizations will likely take advantage of evolving technologies such as Cloud Computing with its nearly infinite computing and storage capabilities. Challenges will include uploading and downloading vast amounts of data, including rapidly changing proprietary data sets. However, the computational power of the cloud environment will offer many benefits including speed of access and the ability to use Extract, Transform and Load technologies to reformat data “on the fly.”
Free maps have popularized geospatial imagery, but they simply don’t offer the quality, robustness, or versatility needed for modern scientific exploration. The vision of the future is to store and maintain dynamic, up-to-date, multi-terabyte imagery databases on the cloud and speedily stream that data back into the enterprise for near real time analysis and decision making. The good news is that this future isn’t all that far away.
Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving holiday! As promised we have added more great 1 meter imagery data to our collection. This time we have added Colorado and New Mexico. If you’re working in these areas, this imagery would make a fantastic backdrop to any project. Let us know if you have a need for this layer.
We are pleased to announce the recent addition of 2009 NAIP Imagery for the eastern third of Texas and the entire State of Colorado. Additional states will be added in the coming weeks. If your projects place you within these areas and you use imagery, be sure to contact Steve Pickett @ 800-736-6277 x110. We can get you the area you need in the format and projection your project requires.
We here at WhiteStar are very pleased to announce the hiring of Jeffrey Marcum as our new Houston Sales Representative. As we are based out of Denver, CO, we are extremely excited to finally have a man on the ground for our Texas customers.
Jeffrey can be reached at 832.316.4557 or via email at jmarcum@whitestar.com.
Dr. Vince Matthews, Colorado State Geologist, spoke to about 30 high level industry representatives and WhiteStar clients yesterday at the University Club of Denver on “The Global Scramble for Natural Resources – Its Impact on Colorado”. The event was co-hosted by Spatial Solutions Group. Matthews warned of escalating prices for metallic and rare earth minerals, even accounting for the recent economic downturn. He also pointed out that China is the sole source for many rare earth minerals used notably in manufacture of vehicles like the Toyota Prius, and that it is now increasingly unwilling to export many metallic and rare-earth minerals. Matthews pointed out that China is rapidly acquiring all of the mineral resources it can during the down economic times at bargain basement prices, including a recent attempt to acquire coal resources in Kentucky and a strategic molybdenum mine in Colorado. This trenda is almost completely unnoticed in America. Matthews likened Chinese mineral resource acquisition to a high stakes game that, “Most Americans do not even know we are playing”. In short, we are selling our children’s futures to foreign interests. Matthews is the State Geologist for Colorado and Director of the Colorado Geological Survey.
Today updates for our Unlimited Product line were shipped out. Current subscribers can look forward to numerous data updates and enhancements. In our blog posts over the past few weeks we have talked about a number of the data and program enhancements users will find and they are described below:
Unlimited Base Map Access: Data Update - Updated pipeline information for the State of Texas. Data Enhancement - Breakout tanks and pipeline information for the State of
Oklahoma Data Enhancement - Pipeline information for the Gulf of Mexico that edge-
matches the State of Texas. Data Enhancement - Oil and Gas Fields/ Pool outlines will be found all
throughout the Appalachian Basin, as well as the following states: Alaska,
Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, New
Mexico, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada & California. Data Enhancement - Added US Forest Service National Forest/Grasslands
Boundaries Enhancement - CDF format support for smartSECTION 4.8.1. This allows users
to load CDF formatted data directly into smartSECTION.
Unlimited Grid Access:
Data Update - Survey updates/corrections for parts of Texas
Enhancement - CDF format support for smartSECTION 4.8.1. This allows users
to load CDF formatted data directly into smartSECTION.
Unlimited Well Access:
Data Update - Well updates for Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Gulf of
Mexico, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee,
Texas, Utah and Wyoming.
We’re really excited about these features and trust you will be also.
After some extensive research, we here at WhiteStar think that we may have found, through a different Wyoming government office, a proper GCDB for the Wyoming Lots & Tracts data. We are currently sifting through this new data set in order to determine the extent of work required in order to make it seamless, as well as the level of accuracy.
So, in regards to the issues that Robert pointed out in his Oct.8 blog, we are still hopeful that we have found a reliable source for the BLM GCDB data in which we can conscientiously provide our customers. Stay tuned, as we will be sure to let you all know how this turns out.
In his September 23rd blog post, Jeff Smith made you all aware of the Oil & Gas Field layer addition to Unlimited Basemap Access (UBA) for 4th Quarter 2009. In addition to the Oil & Gas fields we’ve added gas transmission and HVL pipelines for the State of Oklahoma as well as pipelines for the Gulf of Mexico. These data sets have been seamless integrated into the already available Texas pipelines. Good stuff!
Here at WhiteStar we are staying true to our vision of providing our clients the data sets needed to make their jobs easier and hopefully more fun. Stay tuned to the blog for additional news on other product improvements and enhancements in the coming weeks.
Recently the BLM published an update of their GCDB data, or the section, township, range, and lot and tract data and published it to their web site. We recently took a close look at the Wyoming update to this data in shape file format. Our clients rely on this data in Wyoming as they use it to plan wells and locate leases in Wyoming’s exploration basins in addition to our industry standard version of the data from USGS topographic maps. There are several troubling aspects to the new BLM data, many of which have been problems right along. For example:
Sections, townships, lots and tracts have been physically moved from the last update, in some instances by as much as 800 feet.
The BLM GCDB Data Quality Information metadata page says that the data are topologically structured. This is not the case. We have identified more than 865 slivers in the data corresponding to gaps and overlaps within the data
The BLM Metadata page states, “The GCDB was created to provide the BLM and its public with a set of geographic foundation data that would most accurately portray the locations of PLSS corners.
These observation are concerning as the data were released without any explanation as to why the township data were moved. Moving large chunks of data by large amounts statewide creates large questions in the data consumer’s mind. I have made a point of telling clients in the past that it is absolutely critical to understand how a data set was acquired, how it was processed, and to understand what the changes mean. Without that piece of information, you are operating your exploration program in the dark.
Given the past two published versions of the data, we see little evidence to indicate that the BLM is honoring their vision for the GCDB cadastral data.
