So in this demo we're gonna go through some of the relatively new time tools that
are available in ArcGIS.
We're gonna work mostly with vector data, so points and polygons in this case.
Although I'm gonna include some information on how to visualize raster
based temporal data as well.
This is in the NetCDF format and we're going to for
this right at the end a little bit.
So the first thing you wanna do is go ahead and
look in the folder that you should have downloaded.
And you'll see that there's quite a lot of stuff.
We've got a few different shape files, orders, Indiana Public Schools, US fires,
US historical states, and
then one kind of weird little NC file in here that's relatively big.
This is that NetCDF file, so we'll deal with this later on.
Don't expect it to show up in ArcGIS without some tweaking.
So go ahead and start a new blank map document if you hadn't.
And we're gonna start off with looking at historical
state boundaries in the US, so go ahead choose add data.
Again if you need a refresher on how to map to particular
folders then look at one of the earlier demonstrations.
But go ahead an in US historical states here.
So what you very quickly probably notice is that's rendering
is that there is lots of overlaps in here.
I'm just switching back to my layer mode here.
It's a good idea to stay on that especially if you're gonna have just
raster or just vector data in.
When I open up the attribute table here what you probably notice is that we have
multiple records for each state.
These are whenever the boundaries changed, the borders changed.
So in this case Alabama changed a little bit at various points.
ANd it's that has a description on it.
So these are from the National Historic GIS database.
Then their links available to these data throughout the demo and the lecture.
So what we wanted to be able to do here is have this start and
end date mean something for us.
At the moment it's a little bit difficult to see anything even if we
try to get some information about a particular space or a particular state.
You can see that we hit quite a lot of them in this same spot.
Louisiana Purchase, Louisiana Territory, and what eventually became Nebraska.
So to do this we need to enable time on the layer.
And we do this like most things, in the layer properties.
So either double click or right click and choose properties.
And you're just gonna go over all the way to the time layer here.
We wanna choose enable time on this layer,
and the default is gonna come up with each feature has a single time field.
That's not true here if you remember from the attribute table we have a start and
end date so we wanna choose each feature has a start and end time field.
Now it's smart enough to figure that out,
that start date is the start time field and end date is the end time field.
But we do wanna do a couple of other things, in this case it is a date time
field, it's stored as a date time object, but if you just had a year or
something like that you might set it in there if it was different.
The time stamp interval, we don't wanna do hours.
Go ahead and make it calculate.
We actually don't even want to do 12 years,
we wanna see what's going on for each year.
So just go ahead and choose this to manually change that to be one year.
And that'll give us a nice smooth transition.
Now go ahead and hit OK.
Now, what you'll probably notice is like a lot of things in ArcGIS is not
much has changed right away.
So the first thing we wanna do, the next thing we wanna do to make sure that we’ve, we're
enabling time, or we're actually able to visualize a time is go up
here in your main sort of toolbar and choose this time slider button.
Just click on that and that'll bring up a new window for you,
that has basically each year as a record.
And you can sort of drag it around and
see what things might have looked like during a particular year.
You can also just simply let it play, sort of like a movie.
I've already kinda gotten past this, the point where a lot of things change.
But you see a few things sort of popping in and
out Hawaii arriving stuff like that.
We do have a lot of other settings that we can do with this.
We can either turn on and off time on the time slider here.
So this will just simply disable it and then re-enable it.
So let's just see the whole layer with one click.
We also have some options that we can do.
We can set what the timestamp interval is,
in this case it's just taking it from that one layer.
If we had multiple layers with multiple timestamps we can do that in here.
We can set what the date format looks like.
Well, I just wanna have it being year in this case since it doesn't really matter
what month it is since we only have data at about once a year.
We can have the map, we can have the time actually up here on the map as well.
We could change the extent so
if we were less worried about coming all the way up to 2015 we could do that.
This is just the last time that this layer was updated.
So if I wanted to do this as 1960 or
something around the last time that something changes, we can change it there.
And if we wanted to change how fast things we're moving,
we could do that in the playback section.
But just go ahead and having changed a few things in the time display, let's hit OK.
And you'll notice that the time is appearing up there.
So it'll change automatically along with everything else.
Now the last thing that we can do is we can render a movie.
This does take up a lot of memory.
It will run slowly and you probably dont wanna open any windows on top of it or
your email might show up in the middle of the video.
So just be careful with that.
We'll work with one of these toward the end of the demonstration.
So let's look at another example.
So this is one where we have polygons that appear and
disappear depending on particular points.
But let's look at one other example here.
So I'm just gonna add in
Indiana Public Schools and then I'm going to zoom to layer on that.
So in this case, time has not been enabled yet on our layer.
I'm going to turn off my historical states and when
I open up the attribute table what you have is for each public school in Indiana.
We have for the records where they exist, we have the year that it was built in
addition to a lot of other information about that school.
Obviously, not all of these 2,656 schools have a year that they were built.
And the first thing we might wanna do is exclude the ones that don't, so
that we can have just the ones that have a year built and
then we can begin to visualize that in time as well.
So let's right-click, go into our properties.
We're gonna go over to the definition query tab, and just like we would do
a selection we're going to click query builder, and we're interested in
only those things where the year built does not equal zero.
So only those ones where it's something other than zero.
If it doesn't pass this thing then we're not gonna see it.
So the ones where it is zero are gonna disappear.
So then hit OK.
So now you see there's not a lot of them left.
We have in our attribute table, 157.
It was quite easy now to go back into public schools layer,
go over to time, enable time.
We're gonna choose year built.
Let's leave it at one year.
And in this case we want to display the data cumulatively.
So we want those things to show up and stick around.
If we'd left this off they would only appear during the year that
they had shown up.
So go ahead and choose display data cumulatively, hit OK.
And now if we bring back up our time slider, as we move along here
the schools that are from those particular years they appear and they stick around.
So it's when they were built, if we had the destruction date or closing date or
something like that we could have that in there as well but
all of these should be one set or still, still modern schools.
So that's another example of bringing in some of these temporal data, and
particularly for ones where we wanna be able to see something appear and stay.
Now let's look at one last thing and that is, how to do this with raster data.
Now, raster data are a lot harder to do temporally because you might have
a few different slices of time from a satellite image or something.
But there are some sources where we have raster data that are taken once a day,
once a year, something like that.
And these are very frequently environmental data.
So, we're going to look at one of these as an example.
So go ahead and just start a new map document.
It's just gonna be easier if we don't have all this pre-existing stuff in there.
And the first thing we wanna do once we've started this new map document,
you could save changes if you wanted to.
So we're gonna add in US border.
This is just something I have in there so you can see where you are so you can
have an idea of where you're located on these layers when they get brought in.
So go ahead and add that in and let's just make it hollow.
I'm gonna make my border nice and red and a little bit thicker.
Now the first thing we have to do is create a link to that NetCDF file.
And we do that in our Arc Toolbox.
So choose Arc Toolbox.
And what we're looking for is Multidimension Tools here, so
choose Multidimension.
We wanna choose make NetCFD raster layer.
There our input NetCDF file is this precipitation monthly
mean that I gave you.
This is the monthly mean precipitation for the entire world.
Hit Open, You
can really just leave everything else as the default, so just go ahead and hit OK.
It'll run for a moment in the background, it's going to create a new layer file.
It's not creating a new file anywhere,
it's just creating a new layer over here for us to be able to use that sort of
links the NetCDF file to the map document that we're dealing with.
This is not a raster data type that's natively supported by ArcGIS.
So once it comes up you'll see that what we have is I'm just
going to close the toolbox so we have a little bit more room to move around.
If we zoom in and out this is world wide.
It goes all the way around the earth.
But we're just gonna sort of focus on the US part here.
Right now it's just showing us one time, one slice in here.
And in fact it's not a particular useful one until we begin to enable time on here.
So let's go ahead and double click on it to go into the layer properties.
We're gonna go over to the time section, and
choose enable time on this later, time dimension is, in this case,
it's saying layer has a time dimension, and our time dimension is time.
Go ahead and calculate your time step interval,
it's gonna come up every two years, let's change it to every two months.
We have monthly data in here, so we may as well see them sort of as they come.
Now I'll go ahead and hit okay, and when we bring up our time slider again.
Now, we can begin to move things around and
see what the climatic conditions with the rainfall look like at a particular time.
We can also just simply hit play and watch it kind of run across.
It'll come more slowly and more speedily as it's sort of rendering.
Now we can do multiple things at the same time as well.
We could, with this raster data in here, we could add in a vector layer that
happens to have time data and see what it looks like.
So let's go ahead and choose add data here again.
And I've also given you this US fires one here.
This is a record of forest fires, wild fires,
in the US, from about the same time interval.
So if you open up the attribute table,
what you'll notice is that you have a start date here for the fire.
So you have a time that it started.
So we can use that if we go back over to time, enable it.
This comes in the start date already.
I'm gonna do the time step interval as every, wel,
I'll do two months again just so that it matches the other one.
And just for ease here, I'm going to choose display data cumulatively.
This isn't actually accurate, fires don't stick around once they're there.
But it will give us a little bit better idea of what's going on and
then we can turn it off if we want to see things a little bit more detailed.
And this is just simply because
it can be hard to catch the individual times that the fires appear.
There's maybe one of them a month or something like that.
But as you can see,
they start appearing, they do tend to be associated with lower rainfall times.
And then they sort of generally kind of come in like this.
Now if we do go back in and
turn off that display data cumulatively, It'll still work.
Everything should work just fine.
But actually catching wind that when you have a fire that appears with one doesn't
actually show up particularly well.
So the easiest way to fix this is to go in to the Time Slider Properties here
and change this time window to be every two months as well.
So what this is doing is it's gonna average things out.
If something occurs within those two months,
even if that one date's time that shows up doesn't catch it, it will still appear.
So now we should be able to see
more commonly some of them appearing sort of averaged out across those two months.
Now the very, very last thing I wanna do here is I wanna show you how to
render a video.
And that's using this third button here.
So I'm just gonna stop this guy.
And when I do this, it's gonna first ask me what I wanna export it as.
Unfortunately, the only thing you can do is export it as an avi
unless you wanted to do sequential images and build your own video out of them.
I'm using this in mind to the same folder that I have been working in, which for
me is my N drive in my GS folder, demo 8.
I'm just gonna call it fire climate.
So, it's gonna first me what I wanna send it out as, what professor, just leave
these as defaults and then it's gonna run for a little while in the background.
In this case it's probably gonna run for a few minutes as it does this.
And this is a situation where I talked about before you probably don't want to
bring in another file,
you probably don't want to open up your email while this is going.
Just leave it going as it is.
Otherwise, you might get an inadvertent screen shot of your email halfway through
the video that you upload to the course site.
So once it's finished running, we will have that video.
We'll be able to display it however you want.
You could bring it up on the internet.
You could make really anything out of it.
I didn't put it in this time,
but we also could have had the year, the month, the time showing up on there
using those same tools in the time slider that we worked with before.
So while this is finishing let me just say that this kind of concludes what I wanna
talk about with temporal data in Arc GIS.
Again, I encourage you to play around with it a little bit,
experiment with building your own temporal layers.
The National Historic GIS database and a few other websites have very,
very good records of this, of different types of temporal data and
other countries may have good things as well.
So let's just go ahead and look at our fire climate,
you can see that it made kind of a large video.
That it's running across just about as well as you would expect.
We have a nice video of it, it runs pretty well.
If you slowed it down a little you could probably see the relationship
between forest fires and climatic conditions in a little bit more detail.
So thank you very much.
Feel free to email me with any questions, and have a good day.