State of Washington

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• University of Washington Data Site has a great deal of data, especially their Raster Data
• Washington State Geospatial Data Archive (WAGDA)

Elevation

• DEM
  • 10m DEMs are available.  the UW site has Washington 10-meter DEMs
  • would a 1k*1k (10km*10km) area be big enough to fit the city of Seattle? not really, 2k*2k is better.
• NED
  • amazingly, there is 1/9 arc-second elevation available on the Seamless National Map server, just for the Puget Sound area - see coverage area to the right
  • it is so detailed that you can see the individual flat road surfaces
  • all water areas are marked as "no data", including the sound and Lake Washington
• the UW Geomorphology Research Group has been attempting to assemble an integrated dataset for Puget Sound that has both normal elevation and bathymetry
  • this is a very tricky task, and they've been trying for years
• Puget Sound LIDAR Consortium is the site of the current group:
  • "public-domain high-resolution topography for western Washington"
  • unfortunately, the elevation data is in the inefficient and awkward .E00 format
• interesting issue: the large body of water east of Seattle is indicated by the DEMs as 4 meters above sea level - how should software know to treat it as a water surface?  Could exploit the DLG hydro areas.

Imagery and other data

• DRGs: Washington Quads Sorted by Name
• WAGDA Puget Sound Orthophotography has 1ft resolution imagery of a few parts of the Puget Sound area, including downtown Seattle
• Roads / Hydro
  • This quad map for the Seattle area can be very useful
• Public Transit
  • managed by the Puget Sound Regional Council, which provides some GIS and Maps
    • when asked, they said that all PSRC Shapefiles are in Washington State Plane, North Zone, NAD83 coordinates
  • The King County website has route maps, but they're the usual nearly-unreadable images

Seattle Area

• existing product: Virtual Seattle (now defunct - see Virtual Tourism)
• central Seattle is interesting terrain - very hilly, with lots of water
• six 7.5-minute USGS Quads cover most of the area of Seattle:
  • duwamish head, kirkland, mercer island, seattle north, seattle south, shilshole bay

Town of Cheney

• contact Ron Hall <email> has done some VTP modelling of Cheney, location of Eastern Washington University
  • in 2005, assembled some basic scenes using USGS Images (1996) and DEMs, added some buildings with VTP building tool
  • the city was shown the visualization and responded positively, assisting with providing better data, including higher resolution imagery from Avista (power company) and interpolated elevation data (done by Avista from DEM) for the City limits including the main campus of EWU.
  • 3D studio max to model a few buildings
  • in 2006, putting together a new visualization with the newer, better data
  • 2006-05-04: 3D students just finished the "rough" draft of the campus project - an animated tour of a good portion of the campus in 3D StudioMax
  • 2006-05-27: Have "unedited" copies of about 20 of the major buildings on campus