Yet Another Hydropower Dam: Nam Ngiep 1

Meanwhile Nam Ngiep 1 dam has been completed and the reservoir has been filled during rainy season in 2018. I.e., it's high time to put in on the map!

Nam Ngiep 1 reservoir area in January 2018

New hydropower dam: Nam Phay

Just recently I've put the Nam Phay hydropower reservoir on the map!

During Lao New Year 2014 I had the chance to visite this area, see pictures below:

The Nam Phay reservoir area in Januar 2015

Another Hydropower dam: Xekaman 1

Just recently I've found by chance the Xekaman 1 hydropower reservoir on Landsat 8 imagery. Time to put it on the map!

The Xekaman river area recorded on 24th January 2015, just before water storage started

Raster math in GRASS GIS using numpy

Houay Lamphan Gnai, yet another hydropower plant just started commercial operations recently with a reservoir area of seven square kilometers as reported by local media. Time to put it on OpenStreetMap using up-to-date Landsat 8 imagery and the new GRASS GIS 7 plugin for QGIS 2.12. To get familiar with GRASS GIS' interface to numpy, I've decided to extract the reservoir using numpy.

Houay Lamphan Gnai on Landsat 8 image taken on the 23rd Oct, 2015

Web Map Service with PyCairo and Pyramid

From time to time I have the chance to work with PyCairo, the Python bindings to the cairo graphic library. I appreciate this library because it allows to draw graphics primitives so super fast and thus it is very suitable to use it in web projects.
After my trials with GRASS GIS as WMS backend I thought I could create a raster web map service with improved performance by using PyCairo instead of GRASS GIS as renderer.

Zoom in - it is a super fast WMS!

Imitating MapBox' Cloudless Atlas

Inspired by several posts which explain MapBox' marvellous Cloudless Atlas, I wanted to imitate a cloudless atlas by myself. Limited in time and computer power I had to do it much simpler of course. But using first class spatial Python libraries I could achieve quite nice results with a simple Python script.

The result: a cloudless Landsat 8 scene

Building ZOO with Java on Ubuntu 12.04

I tried to build the ZOO WPS platform with Java support on Ubuntu 12.04 and it turned out to be not so easy. This is how I managed it with OpenJDK 7 (packages openjdk-7-jdk and openjdk-7-jre):

./configure LDFLAGS=-L/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64/jre/lib/amd64/server --with-java=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64

For unknown reasons the configuration writes wrong JAVALDFLAGS to the Makefile, thus the Makefile needs to be altered as follows. Replace the line where the JAVALDFLAGS are defined:

JAVALDFLAGS=-L/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64/jre/lib/amd64/client/ -ljvm -lpthread

with

JAVALDFLAGS=-L/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64/jre/lib/amd64/server/ -ljvm -lpthread

then follow the normal instructions with

make