Re: mpAreaNames

From: Dave Kennison (kennison AT XXXXXX)
Date: Thu Jul 08 2004 - 17:20:39 MDT


Heiko,

> thank you very much for your information. I managed now to plot all
> countries I need from the Earth..2 database. If you have it at hand,
> could you send me the program you used to print the names included into
> the database, as example on how to use the database.

I have such a program in FORTRAN, which I had hoped to adapt and comment
and send with this email, but I didn't get in done in time. If it would
be useful to you, I will send it on Monday. (I'll be on vacation leave
tomorrow.)

> I'm now wondering where the data of the Ncarg4_1 database is coming
> from. Do you know about any references? It seems to be much more
> up-to-date than the CIA World Database 2 (which corresponds to 1980).

Data sources that we have used include the following:

  - A. V. Hershey (for the original databases 'CO', 'PO', 'PS', and 'US')

  - large-format USGS maps digitized at NCAR by me (for political outlines
    used in the database 'PS' and copied over into "Earth..x")

  - on-line USGS data for the coastlines in "Earth..x"

  - WDB2 for some of the political outlines for countries resulting from
    the breakup of the USSR, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia; for the most
    part, these were provincial boundaries that became country boundaries

  - WDB2 and the World Vector Shoreline (WVS) for coastlines in the
    RANGS/GSHHS database; these were heavily processed by Paul Wessel,
    Walter Smith, and/or Reiner Feistel to remove errors, and were
    originally used in the package GMT (Generic Mapping Tools)

> I'm mainly interested in political boundaries. While the
> coastline-boundaries from the RANGS database are more than good enough,
> even in MediumResolution, the resolution while plotting some smaller
> European country, i.e. Netherlands is quite low. Do you or anybody in
> the list know about a free higher resolution database for political
> boundaries?

I would like to find such a source. One thing that I could do is use
data from WDB2 to improve the resolution of the political boundaries in
the "Earth..x" databases, but that is time-consuming, since the data are
very buggy and require a lot of massaging. They are also somewhat out of
date, which may not be an issue for many countries, but is an issue for
some.

ESRI has a database called ESRI World Basemap Data, from which one can
download selected portions in "shapefile" format. When last I checked,
they didn't want downloaders to convert the data to another format (which
is what I would like to do). According to the Web site, these data were
published in 1999 and reflect political realities as of about 1/1/1992, so
they are about 12 years out of date; however, it is possible that they do
react to some changes (like the creation of Serbia and Montenegro from ...
whatever that piece of Yugoslavia was called).

GMT contains political outlines, but they are sort of in the same boat as
we are. They say:

  The political borders are for the most part 1970ies-style and do not
  reflect the recent border rearrangements in Europe. We intend to update
  these as high-resolution data become available to us.

And, as an aside, they have another problem that we do:

  Some users of "pscoast" will not be satisfied with what they find for the
  Antarctic shoreline. In Antarctica, the boundary between ice and ocean
  varies seasonally and interannually. There are some areas of permanent
  sea ice. In addition to these time-varying ice-ocean boundaries, there
  are also ice grounding lines where ice goes from floating on the sea to
  sitting on land, and lines delimiting areas of rock outcrop. For con-
  sistency's sake, we have used the World Vector Shoreline throughout
  the world in "pscoast", as described in the GMT cookbook Appendix K.
  Users who need specific boundaries in Antarctica should get the Antarc-
  tic Digital Database, prepared by the British Antarctic Survey, Scott
  Polar Research Institute, World Conservation Monitoring Centre, under
  the auspices of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research. This
  data base contains various kinds of limiting lines for Antarctica and
  is available on CD-ROM. It is published by the Scientific Committee on
  Antarctic Research, Scott Polar Research Institute, Lensfield Road,
  Cambridge CB2 1ER, United Kingdom.

Dave Kennison

_______________________________________________
ncl-talk mailing list
ncl-talk@ucar.edu
http://mailman.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/ncl-talk



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jul 12 2004 - 08:04:05 MDT