Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Geoscience Australia new catalogue

Geoscience Australia has just released a new, map based catalogue to assist visitors to the site in the discovery and access to a diverse range of data, products and services available from the organisation.  Discovery and Delivery System is in beta release for public testing so, unfortunately not everything is working properly in Internet Explorer. However, you will still be able to find a lot of goodies there like, for example, over 100,000 historic Landsat-7 and Landsat-5 images over Australia captured between 2000 and 2010. These can be viewed as WMS overlays on the map or can be downloaded as data (in NetCDF format, but be careful, each scene is more than a gigabyte in size).


Mapping functionality of the catalogue is built with Google Map API. Backdrop map is a standard satellite overlay but users have a choice of several custom layers provided by GA, such as topographic map, land cover map, geology map or gravity map. 

The catalogue lists publications as well as data for use with GIS software. Advanced search option allows refining search criteria by specific theme, geographic location and time frame. Links provided in search results take users directly to a download page. The catalogue is a convenient way to discover what is available from Geoscience Australia although, at first, the choice may appear a bit overwhelming!

Related Posts:
Australian floods mapped
Google unlocks Landsat archives
Landslides in Australia
Continental reference image

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I couldnt view this blog entry through IE7 :(.

All Things Spatial said...

Works perfectly for me in IE7 :-)

On a more serious note, it is quite a dilemma for developers trying to use modern HTML5 standard and, at the same time, maintaining compatibility with old IE7 and IE8 browsers. I know the pain! But there are no excuses for neglecting IE9 :-)