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Hawaii Earthquake 3D Map
posted by Satri
on Tuesday October 17, @09:09AM
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from the geospatial-shaking dept.
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from the geospatial-shaking dept.
Xenon writes "Yesterday I threw together a 3D visualization map of the location of the Oct 15th Hawaii earthquake. My goal was to illustrate the position and relative depth of the epicenter compared to the local seafloor and the height of the island's volcanic peaks. I of course, used my company's Visual Nature Studio 2 to do it, because I'm familiar with it and I knew it could quickly pull together the data I needed.
An interesting problem I encountered has bigger ramifications: The bathymetry DEM data I needed was hosted on web servers at — you guessed it — University of Hawaii! These servers were completely offline due to the power outages and general infrastructural disruption. Luckily, Ben Discoe of the Virtual Terrain Project had a copy mirrored on his server, which is hosted on the mainland. Ben himself lives in a rural area of the Big Island, and is presumably out of communication until infrastructure repairs.
Many people regard the Internet as a disruption-resistant design, but that only applies to the network as a whole. Individual sites may be completely non-redundant, and critical data may be unavailable from a single-point-of-failure like this. Many valuable web-based data sources have unexpectedly disappeared forever in the past — one should always consider preemptively making local cached copies of important data to ward against future unavailability — temporary or permanent, planned or unplanned."
An interesting problem I encountered has bigger ramifications: The bathymetry DEM data I needed was hosted on web servers at — you guessed it — University of Hawaii! These servers were completely offline due to the power outages and general infrastructural disruption. Luckily, Ben Discoe of the Virtual Terrain Project had a copy mirrored on his server, which is hosted on the mainland. Ben himself lives in a rural area of the Big Island, and is presumably out of communication until infrastructure repairs.
Many people regard the Internet as a disruption-resistant design, but that only applies to the network as a whole. Individual sites may be completely non-redundant, and critical data may be unavailable from a single-point-of-failure like this. Many valuable web-based data sources have unexpectedly disappeared forever in the past — one should always consider preemptively making local cached copies of important data to ward against future unavailability — temporary or permanent, planned or unplanned."
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More on the earthquake from ESRI
(Score:2)( http://alexandreleroux.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @05:07PM )