Nuclear Plant Engineer hides corrosion damage

MSNBC reports here on an engineer at the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant who was convicted of misleading regulators about "the worst corrosion ever found at a U.S. reactor" and attesting that the plant was safe.


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Plant Location courtesy of POWERmap

This video might take a little while to load (and there's no sound) but it is pretty cool-it showcases the new birds-eye navigation in Microsoft's Virtual Earth. Never seen Virtual Earth? It's Microsoft's alternative to Google Earth and is embed right in your web browser rather than a separate application. This video demonstrates VE's technology whereby they actually drape mosaic'd photographs of actual buildings over 3-d models of the urban landscape. This technology was developed by Boulder, CO based Vexcel Corporation, a leader in the remote sensing business.

Real World GIS: Points, Lines, Polygons

If you’re a reader of maps, then you’re already familiar with the common graphical devices map makers (cartographers) use to represent real world features on a two-dimensional surface. If you look at a common reference map, like a road map, you may see rest-stops displayed as a point of some kind; highways and roads displayed as lines colored and sized by their type; and perhaps a city metropolitan area displayed as an enclosed polygon delineating the extent of the urban area.

So how does this relate to GIS? A Geographical Information System stores and represents real world features using the same graphical methodology. Every discrete feature on the Earth’s surface can be represented as a point, line, or polygon. And by discrete, I refer to features that have a distinct boundary, like power-plants, substations, transmission lines and counties. Examples of continuous features - features that exist “everywhere”- include wind speed, elevation, and temperature. For now we’ll keep our focus on discrete data that can be represented with geometric shapes (vectors) and save our “continuous data” discussion for another day.

So how do we decide how to represent a feature within a GIS? The short answer is… it depends upon how close or how far away we are from the object, aka “map scale”. I’ll discuss map scale in more detail in my next post. In the meantime, here’s an example. If you’re looking at a map showing the entirety of North America, New York City would be best shown as a single point. After all, from that far away, even a polygon or line would look like a point, so it makes sense to use a point. On the flip side, if you were looking at a road- map of the state of New York, New York City would be better represented as polygon showing the boundary of the urban area. See the relationship? The important concept to remember here is that all features of the discrete type are displayed using points, lines, or polygons (nothing else), and that the symbol type used is scale dependant.

In my next post I’ll discuss “map scale” in more detail and how it relates to the GIS layers developed and offered by Platts Geospatial.

An aerial view of daylight

I found this interesting view of daylight on the Earth's surface while websurfing this weekend. You can even adjust it to view clouds or weather patterns.
Click here

Here is a more visually exciting option but without some of the options. Click here.

Great map podcast

The radio series This American Life broadcast a fascinating story of a cartographer intent on mapping the unconventional features of a landscape. Well worth the listen: Click here

What is a GIS?

GIS is short for Geographic Information Systems, a fancy way of saying “digital maps”. Ultimately, a GIS is a database with geographic features attached. It allows the data querying that one is accustomed to in the data environment with the added dimension of allowing one to perform those queries spatially and view your results in a map. This is a very exciting time to explore the power of maps and GIS thanks to an ever expanding array of software tools both for the layperson and the expert.

Welcome to the Platts Geospatial blog

Our aim with this site is to give our customers and those in the Energy industry a place to learn about what you can do with maps and GIS (we’ll explain what that is) to further your analytical needs. Our goal with this site is to turn on those in the energy industry to news and resources in the GIS world in the hopes that we can help you do your job better and maybe even ignite in you the same excitement that we have for maps and GIS.