Tornado

ArcGIS Pro Demo-nado

OK. The GIS World has had the much anticipated ArcGIS Pro for about 3 months now, and everyone is still using ArcMap. Why? Because change is hard. 

Geo-Professionals should really change that, because ArcPro, Pro, ArcGIS Pro, AGP whatever-we-call-it is actually a pretty good product. YES, it has some shortcomings, as most first versions do. However, in a very unofficial tally from a group of 12 GIS professionals, the good outweighed the bad 8-5. Not a blowout be any means, but a positive result nonetheless. 

It's no surprise that we (Cloudpoint) are behind the product. Ok, I am. I recently doubled my RAM in may MacBook in-part to be able to devote more speed to Parallels to run ArcPro. It runs well too! Drawing does slightly stutter when in 3D but that doesn't matter because I have yet to be convinced that my clients want or need 3D GIS.

I digress. This morning I created the two videos below in order to demonstrate ArcGIS Pro and several of it's best qualities (not 3D). The videos are fast paced, packed full and I kept them between 6 & 7 minutes. This is not GIS training, you can't train any person GIS in 7 minutes, let alone on a new piece of software.  I hope you enjoy them and then download your copy of Pro to try it out. 


  • In this first video of a two-part series, We simply walk around the interface and perform some SIMPLE actions. Opening a Map, Editing map notes and understanding what happens.


  • In this Second video of a two-part series, we will talk about importing an ArcMap MXD, Editing and touch briefly on navigating layouts. 

Please leave a comment on YouTube if you like it. 

EF4 "Washington" Tornado Mapped

With all of this technology, With all of this knowledge with all of this progress, planning and pride, in the end, all we can do is stand and watch...then help rebuild after the storm. 

We really haven't been in the office too much this week. For obvious reasons. However thanks to the ease of ArcGIS Online and work of some other GIS folks in the area, we are able to set up this map depicting the relative path and some field verified points of destruction in the area. Here is a link to an Editable point of impact map: http://bit.ly/1hZlRTG

Another Map to see the aerial view Side-By-Side with preTornado aerial photos. http://ow.ly/r49V0

Zooom Out to see the ESTIMATED Tornado Path and More areas Affected. 


View Larger Map

Also *Special Shoutout to City of Pekin GIS and the OSM Volunteer Editors busy digitizing home footprints.