Location: Nevada

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State of Nevada - General Notes

• excellent server of Nevada data at the Keck Earth Sciences and Mining Research Information Center
• DRG Maps of Nevada
• USGS Lake Tahoe Data Clearinghouse
• the UCLA UST (Urban Simulation Team) modeled part of downtown Las Vegas
• City of Las Vegas

  • February 23, 2007: New 3D Buildings in Las Vegas.  Google Earth's 3DWarehouse now includes new buildings for Las Vegas (kmz), including over 50 models of the hotels and casinos.

2006/7: Burning Man Earth

• In June 2007, a KML file of the 2006 site was released, "a collaborative project between Burning Man and the Google Earth team."  Most of the data is 2D (imagery/place names) but there are 3D models of the man, the center camp, and other camps as people add them.
  

1999 VTP Demo: Black Rock City, Nevada

"Black Rock City" is a temporary city built each year for the Burning Man festival, in the Black Rock Desert (BRD) of northeast Nevada, around 150 km north of Reno.  In 1999, a VTP simulation of the area was assembled, and exhibited at the festival.

General

• the area straddles the border of Washoe and Pershing counties, with part of the northern BRD in Humboldt county

Elevation

• because the terrain is so bleak, elevation is the data source that contributes most to visualization
• as of 2003, some 10m DEMs have become available for this part of Nevada
• surveyed what was available on geocomm.com as of 2003.03.08, looking at a 4x7 grid of quads around the BRD area:

Quad Name	10m	30m	10m file #	30m file#
Smith Canyon		X		1650434
West of empire		X		1650250
Empire		X		1650428
Ten mile		X		1650191
Eagle Rock spring		X		1650182
Dead Horse canyon		X		1650171
Juniper canyon		X		1649992
Wall spring	X		1706507
Godeys rock	X		1706508
Gerlach	X		1706509
Dry Mountain NW	X		1706510
Dry Mountain	X		1706511
Sheep Spring		X		1650170
Dead Horse Canyon NE		X		1649991
Squaw Valley	X	X	1706496	1650433
The Banjo	X	X	1706497	1651576
Hualapai Flat S	X		1706498
Trego	X		1706499
Trego Hot Springs	X		1706500
Cholona	X		1706501
Rabbithole	X	X	1706502	1675032
Crutcher Canyon	X	X	1706485	1650432
Melody Mountain	X	X	1706486	1651829
Hualapai Flat N	X		1706487
Mormon Dan Peak	X	X	1706488	1651575
Black Rock Point W	X	X	1706489	1650853
Black Rock Point E	X	X	1706490	1650854
Rabbithole NE	X		1706491

• summary: about 70% of the nearby quads are now available at 10m
• 10-meter DEM extraction
  • 2003.08.13 extracted 4k area at (292484.7, 4500149.0), ( 40960, 40960) - exactly 10m (UTM zone 11 NAD27)
  • converted to Zone 11 WGS84, extents are: (292403.4, 4500351.2), (333363.4, 4541311.2) - only around 100m different

Imagery

• New in 2003: LandSat7 tiles: p043r032_7p20000531 has most of the area, some of the northern BRD is on tile p043r031_7p19990630
• these tiles are from the GLCF-ESDI and are in UTM Zone 11 WGS84, used Global Mapper to extract the 3 rectangular areas from the 3 TIF bands and PhotoShop to merge them into an RGB image
• small "Hue" shift from red toward yellow
• see resulting image, LS7 from raw RGB bands, to the left
• looks great draped on the 10m elevation:
  
• As reported in the Google Earth Blog on October 03, 2006:
  • Looks like Google acquired an aerial photo of the Burning Man 2006 event and has incorporated it as part of the big update pushed out today. Check it out here.  Also, you can view it in Google Maps. It looks like an aerial photo showing the event during its busiest time. The event was held on August 28 through September 4th, so this data is only a month old! How's that for current data? The resolution of this image looks to be a little less than 1 foot per pixel.

Culture

• Mapping Black Rock City with GPS
  • Some GPS data fro 2005/2006
  • An older site had waypoint/track data for the roads, camps and other features, for BM 2003; files available in 5 different GPS formats.  Apparently output from a program called BRCmap; there doesn't seem to be a central page for BRCmap, although google did find a pagewww.hisys.com/brcmap/ it appears to be gone as of 2005.
• the following 'culture' was modelled in 3DS MAX by Cassandra:
  • the burning man (1 instance)
  • lamp post (many instances, placed at some of their 1999 locations)
  • several tents (not added yet)

    (3.8MB PDF file)

Time element

• the simulation moves between the present (1999) and the late Pleistocene (around 14000 B.C.), ping-ponging repeatedly
• in the past, Lake Lahontan reappears, modelled as a single fixed-elevation water plane intersecting the terrain
• reference: Extent of Pleistocene Lakes in the Western Great Basin
• a text sprite shows the current date

Additional data sources

• cracked-mud texture created from a photograph of the Black Rock Desert floor, used as a repeating detail texture on the entire terrain
• according to the organizers, "the '96 site is off the 12-mile (second) exit onto the playa. Drive 12 miles north on the west playa road from the 12 mile entrance and then right and go 4 miles east. The GPS coordinates are N 40.9119 W 119.1031"

Older project notes

• 1-degree DEM

  • the black X shows the approximate location of Black Rock City in 1998 - in 1999 it actually moved far south-west towards the town of Gerlach
  • the odd distortion you see on the flat areas is not due to JPEG compression, but rather to the inaccurate nature of the1-degree DEMs
• 30-meter DEM
  • 00.08.29 in preparation for BM2000, attempted to acquire and process higher resolution (30m) DEMs from the USGS website, where they are available in SDTS format
  • the 30m data is in UTM zone 11 NAD27
  • some of the quads are Level 1 DEMs, some are Level 2
  • the Level 1 looks OK, but the Level 2 are radically better quality than the 1-degree DEMs
  • problem: it is a terribly tedious operation to individually browse to, download, decompress, rename, and import the large number of cryptically-named quads required to cover the area
  • 71 quads were downloaded
  • problem: some quads were indicated "no data available", e.g. DONNA SCHEE SPRING, NV
  • extracted area at (292484.7, 4478531.2), (79221.4, 75781.6)
  • this is roughly 38m * 37m resolution