Time to explore the trails
Enjoy ruby flushed sunsets sweeping through hemlocks and fresh rhododendron blooms as you hike through murals of eroded sandstone. Our maps take you there.
If you’re planning on hiking in the Daniel Boone NF, Great Smoky Mountains NP, Cumberland Gap NHP, or in Kentucky state parks, we might have a map and digital geodata for you. Check out our shop for maps and data you can purchase online.
We aggregate data from the National Weather Service, National Park Service, and Dry Sky to serve weather stations to help hikers understand weather and road conditions for the Daniel Boone National Forest and Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Time for a trip? Looking for a weekend in the woods, alone and untroubled by maintaining your boring social media accounts? Need to get lost for awhile? We understand that instinct and have maps to help. Consider wandering into a landscape of sandstone cliffs, river fords, and bear in the Big South Fork and North Daniel Boone Country.
Time to check the weather before packing your gear. Each of our stations (GRSM, CUGA, and DBNF) offer current weather observations, forecasts, webcams, archives, and climate information that updates every 15 minutes. Smell the mountain air, through the internet.
We have more weather mapping projects that we’re tinkering with. Check our GitHub repositiory that shows the radar for the Daniel Boone country and imagery from the GOES-16 satellite.
“Thus situated, many hundred miles from our families in the howling wilderness, I believe few would have equally enjoyed the happiness we experienced. I often observed to my brother, You see now how little nature requires to be satisfied. Felicity, the companion of content, is rather found in our own breasts than in the enjoyment of external things; And I firmly believe it requires but a little philosophy to make a man happy in whatsoever state he is. This consists in a full resignation to the will of Providence; and a resigned soul finds pleasure in a path strewed with briars and thorns.”
An account from Daniel Boone, 1784 from “The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone” (1784), by John Filson and Daniel Boone.
Visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park with our GPS pack and GeoPDF
Recent blog posts
Class mapping project
Web page for student maps
NRE 355, Introduction to Geospatial Applications for Land Analysis, is a class at the University of Kentucky (UK) that uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to study our environment. Every year NRE 355 constructs various maps centered around an environmental theme. Past themes have included Pilot Knob State Nature Preserve and Pine Mountain, both in Kentucky.
This semester our class focused on tree canopy coverage in specific neighborhood associations inside New Circle Road in Lexington, Kentucky to feature ecosystem services provided by urban tree canopy. We use ArcGIS software to process vector, raster, GPS, and lidar data that determines vegetation density, tree canopy coverage, and tree height. We publish GeoPDF and interactive maps that show our work.
This tree canopy study was conducted in several different neighborhoods within the area of New Circle Road in Lexington, Kentucky.
The neighborhoods involved were:
- Ashland
- Ashland Park
- Aylesford
- Cardinal Valley
- Castlewood
- Columbia Heights
- Martin Luther King
- North Limestone
- Northside
The neighborhood with the most tree canopy per acre was Ashland Park, while the lowest counted tree canopy per acre was in the MLK Neighborhood. The tallest tree was located in the Ashland Neighborhood, a spruce or tulip poplar measuring, with lidar technology, at 114 feet tall.
Visit the website: https://rvirto01.github.io/NRE355_Tree_canopy_study/
Bird’s eye view of the North Limestone Neighborhood Association showing tree heights relative to building heights
High-resolution weather imagery from GOES-16
This weather satellite captures 16 spectral bands with time resolutions as quick as every 30 seconds. The spatial resolution (the size of each pixel) is between 0.5 km and 2 km and the visible grayscale image for the continental US is 12,000 x 9,000 pixels and is collected every 5 minutes.
We wrote a series of crontab jobs to automate the processing of weather imagery to display on our website.
Real-time satellite image maps
- We have the current satellite image with our parks dropped on the map for reference:
outragegis.com/weather/goes16/current.jpg
(1,900 px x 1,932 px, ~900k) - Here is the recent two-hour time-lapse image:
outragegis.com/weather/goes16/animation.gif
(1,900 px x 1,932 px, ~40 MB) - Starting on September 4, we’ll create day-long time-lapse animations:
outragegis.com/weather/goes16/yesterday.gif
(1,900 px x 1,932 px, ~350 MB)
2:45pm looking across Rich Mountain and Cades Cove
For over a decade we’ve collected views from reliable weather web cams to build daily time-lapse animations for the Great Smoky Mountains. We’ve called the project Yesterday in the Great Smokies and offer a daily archive for the past three calendar years.
The August total solar eclipse in the southern Great Smokies offered a great opportunity to showcase some unique images from the archive. (read more…)
Check out all posts in our blog.
Recent photos
Sample some of the scenes we enjoy from the areas we live and work.
Find more travel photos.
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