Island of Oahu

• it would be nice to take advantage of the large amount of GIS data that's available for Oahu
• island extents are ~66*50km, UTM zone 4, covered by 16 USGS 7.5" quads
• the whole island is one county, called the "City & County of Honolulu" (CCH)

General Data

• USGS Hawai'i Data Clearinghouse: Oahu includes:
  • Boundaries, Roads, Hydrography, Soil in SHP format
  • LandSat7 in JPEG format
  • DRG
  • "Ortho Imagery", which is the USDA Emerge tiles merged into a single image for the whole island
• For the other USGS data for the island, presumably this is acquired by going through the national USGS channels.
• City & County of Honolulu: Department of Planning and Permitting Web Site: GIS Maps and Data
  • Has many useful layers, but the site seems to be fairly out of date.  Most layers are a few years old, there is no mention of the 2004 aerials, or 2004 building footprints.

Elevation

• 10m DEMs available from USGS for the whole island
• at 8K*8K, a 8.0*6.1m grid is possible
• on 2000.02.29, extracted a 4k BT at (573909.5, 2350636.3), ( 66305.6, 51264.8), looks great, though the shoreline seems quite inaccurate
• reportedly, LIDAR data exists for the Honolulu downtown shoreline - need more information

DLG and DRG

• roads and hydro DLG at 7.5" are available.  2001.02 ordered, received, data looks good, and fairly well up-to-date
• DRG: 2001.02 ordered, received.  14 of the files are normal USGS scanned topo maps, but one of them (Koko head) is from NIMA
  • the NIMA DRG looks radically different
  • all lines are rendered with aliasing, small buildings have no orientation, overall it is clearly computer-rendered from digital sources rather than scanned from a paper map
• fortunately a large number of the landmark buildings are present as outlines
• Oahu DRGs are online on the SOEST site Island DRG, as well as the USGS Clearinghouse

Aerial Imagery

• SOEST has Shoreline Imagery and Data for Oahu (shockwave!)
  • however, the files are troublesome - the JPEGs lack CRS info, and the TIFs appear to be badly formed?
• Emerge Aerials for Oahu:
  • see VTP Collection of Hawaii USDA/Emerge Tiles for the raw tiles
  • the USGS Clearinghouse has the USGS-merged image (128 MB)
• In 2005, the USGS Seamless Server (SDDS) has a list of hi-res orthophotos which includes the whole island.  This is now accessible through The National Map.
  • Urban Area: Honolulu, HI
  • Acquisition Date on Imagery: April 2004
  • Resolution: 0.3 meters
  • Projection: UTM
  • Date Available: January 13, 2006
  • However, like other SDDS rasters, it is only available for download in custom sections, slowly, given a small area of interest as a rectangle, no more than "approximately a 4 x 4 mile area", yet Oahu is roughly 42 x 33 miles in extent.
  • What is the source of this data? The metadata says "Credits: National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).  The following companies produced the data to support this task -3001, Inc. and EarthData International, LLC", specifically "EarthData Aviation".  EarthData Aviation acquired the assets of Emerge (announced October 17, 2005).  Possible connection to the 1m Emerge aerials collected in Hawai'i from 2001-2003?  Probably not.  Looks like NGA hired EarthData to gather fresh data.
  • Metadata also says April 13, 2005 for Source_Time_Period_of_Content, instead of 2004 as the SDDS site says
  • Where is it available in one piece?  Why is it not available on the DPP site?
• SOEST 2005 coastal aerials
  • unreferenced aerials from the shoreline on the southeast half of the island
  • very high resolution - full scans of the (film) photographs are 6400 x 6539 px
  • coverage emphasis on the Kaneohe area of windward Oahu

Commercial City Models

• CyberCity Honolulu - 3D buildings (footprints + height)
• PLW Modelworks - Honolulu 30 Sq km, Imagery date 2010, "Photo-accurate 3D City Model"

GIS Data

• GIS layers for the whole island exists, certainly including buildings, and parcel boundaries - who has it, and how much does it cost?
• some layers are online, on the Statewide GIS site and the Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting (DPP)'s site gis.hicentral.com (HoLIS)
• the DPP, according toPACAF has many data layers including some which might be useful for visualization:
  • Highways/major Streets
  • Parcel Boundaries (DPP/FIN)
  • Street Centerline
  • Topographic 5 Foot Contour Lines
• the DPP had both a web viewer (ArcIMS based) and even some data directly on their FTP site
• strangely, all their data appears to be in the old projection "Old_Hawaiian_StatePlane_Hawaii_3_FIPS_5103"
• other layers include 100m false-color LandSat, and high-res aerials of selected areas in MrSID format
• Historically, for Oahu, the situation as of the mid-1990s was:
  • You must lease the right to access the data layers from the Department of Land Utilization, for one year, cannot give it to anyone else or make any reproductions of it, and must pay a varied fee for each layer depending on data size and comprehensivity: the cost is approximately $35,000 for all the data layers of the City and County of Honolulu [...] The State of Hawai‘i not only has no vision of public information access, but it has no current policy: State data layers used by OSP (Office of State Planning) and other departments, also collected with public funds, cannot be purchased at any price." [source]

Building Footprints

• the building footprints from the DPP site are somewhat spotty
  • consists of around 8 areas on south-eastern Oahu
  • interestingly, the largest patch of footprints are in an area which the 10m DEM says is ocean, consisting of most of the town of Kailua
  • each footprint has height in stories, and a large fraction of the buildings also have height in feet!
• The Building Footprint Geo-Database Project (2004)
  • undertaken by the DPP "To further enhance the City's existing GIS. The City contracted USI-Hawaii Inc. [no longer exists] to implement data acquisition and Geo-Database development."
  • the project is described in Honolulu, Hawaii Building Footprint Geo-Database Project: 3D Urban Visualization, Paper# 1693 (pdf)
  • beyond footprints, they actually captured texture-mapped models for the buildings, and used these to produce flyover movies
  • they used ESRI products and Nverse Photo for most of the work, and 3DS MAX for the flyover (non-realtime) rendering
  • the area was relatively small: just Downtown, Kakaako, Waikiki, and Diamond Head.
  • why do the resulting footprints not appear on the DPP site?

The RAPIDSite model

• Back in 2000 or 2001, the CCH GIS department used E&S RAPIDsite software to create a nice visualization of Waikiki Gateway Park.   There is an article describing the project at Geoplace: 3-D Visualization Illustrates Hawaiian Gateway.  The source data included "a Shapefile with 20-foot contours, a color digital orthophoto with 1m resolution, Shapefiles with building footprints and heights, DWG files with detailed building footprints for modeling 'landmark' buildings, and a set of 360-degree horizon views."
• CCH GIS Manager Ken Schmidt said some really exciting, promising things about GIS and 3D:
  • "CCH is considering a 'virtual permitting' program that would use visualization technology to evaluate all proposed developments in Honolulu. Each developer will submit source data to the planning department, which will use it to create a dynamic 3D site model in RAPIDsite and incorporate it into a RAPIDsite model of Waikiki."
• However, its not clear what became of this project.  Despite the success, i haven't found evidence of any further 3D as part of the CCH planning process.  The RAPIDsite software was later discontinued.  Perhaps the 3D initiative fell victim to the usual government budget and priority fluctuation.
• It seems that Ken Schmidt is still with CCH GIS (at least as of 2004), kschmidt@co.honolulu.hi.us

Games

• MegaCITY Hawaii for MS Flight Simulator 2004
  • Apparently takes the USGS hi-res orthophotos from 2004 and reformats them for use in MSFS, available as a reasonable $10 download.
  • While the source data is at 1 foot and 2 feet per pixel, in MSFS 2004 it displays at 4.8 meters per pixel.
• Test Drive: Unlimited for X-Box 360
  • Models the entire island of Oahu, including 1600km of roads, for a racing game.
  • although the emphasis is on racing action, not terrain, the scenery in the games looks quite nice, with a lot of hand-modelled culture along the roads

Pearl Harbor: Ford Island

Reference Photos

View of Downtown Honolulu area taken from the top of the Honolulu Municipal Building.

View north from Aloha Tower.

View east from Aloha Tower.

View east across Manoa Valley.