Island of Kaua‘i

• General Data: USGS Hawai'i Clearinghouse: Kauai Data
• the size of the island is around 45*35km, not as large as the big island, thereby making possible much higher resolution: 5.5*4.3m using an 8K*8K grid
• very popular tourism region, well-shaped (squarish)
• a single LandSat scene contains the whole island, making good imagery cheaper and more likely, but Kaua‘i has the worst cloud coverage problems of the whole island chain
• Kauaian Institute
  • "maintains an extensive geographic information system (GIS) for mapping the physical, economic, and ecological features of the island with client-tailored themes, 3D images, and virtual reality programs"
  • run by Ken Ka‘imi Stokes who lives on the island
  • as of 2000, he had done some work on Kaua‘i ahupua‘a boundaries, but did not have a GIS tool other than ArcExplorer, is this still the case?
• contact: Sam at the Nature Conservancy
  • may be working on a vegetation layer

Imagery

• old aerials exist: greyscale OrthoQuads from 1977-1978
• i looked at a large number of LandSat7 thumbnails, but they all had serious cloud coverage, then i discovered:
• Stephen Stetson did a good job of producing a ~30m image from LandSat, with some other images composited to fill in cloudy area
  • 2048*2048 image size
  • he has very generously offered VTP permission to freely distribute the image, which is now in the Repository
• 2012: PLOTS has georegistered balloon aerials of Kukuiula, Koloa, Kauai

Elevation

• 2000.02: ordered from the USGS and received 10m DEMs for the island (UTM, zone 4, NAD83)
• 2000.02.26: used VTBuilder to extract a BT file at UTM (418205.4, 2418097.5), (51739.7, 41208.5)
• DEM problem! the elevation data in the USGS DEM for the "Waimea Canyon" quad is offset by approximately (-285, 196) meters, which results in "cliff" feature where it doesn't match the 4 surrounding DEMs
• VTBuilder can be used to shift the extents to their correct location, but that leaves a wide gap on the north and west sides, i don't know how to solve this
• new hope: 10-meter DEMs from gis.ess.washington.edu don't seem to have the problem!
  • they are also UTM, zone 4, NAD83
  • was able to extract a good 4k*4k BT file

Intelesense: Hawaii Deployments

• InteleSense is a NASA spinoff company making wireless environmental sensors which can be deployed remotely.  The initial development and testing of their technology was done in an extremely rugged and biologically rich region of North Kauai.  The resulting information stream is visualized in their 3D viewer, InteleView, which is a flavor of NASA WorldWind.