weeknotes: more NASA

A bit of a lull in GEOG 868 progress in the last week, as I crammed the prerequisites for the NASA ARSET course I mentioned last week.

I attended the first session yesterday and enjoyed my second bout of playing with Google Earth Engine (GEE), having played with it briefly during one of the prerequisite courses. The remaining sessions are on the 4th, 9th and 11th August, with a homework assignment due by the 25th. There is plenty to learn about the world of remote sensing, to say the least, but I won’t be spending too much time focused on it just now. If / when I decide to take my Oxford Uni assignment any further then I’ll revisit this stuff. For now I shall be turning my focus back to my spatial database management course.

Speaking of which, I got a little way into Lesson 3 earlier today. I finished setting up my first PostgreSQL database with a PostGIS extension enabled. And got pgadmin4 connected to it. And loaded a couple of shapefiles into it.

Since I’m doing things on my linux laptop (rather than windows desktop) I spent some time figuring out the ogr2ogr command for importing a Shapefile to PostGIS, rather than some .exe for windows mentioned in the lesson. That ended up looking like this:

ogr2ogr -f PostgreSQL PG:"host=localhost port=5432 dbname=Lesson3db user=postgres password=......" -lco SCHEMA=usa -nlt GEOMETRY -nln cities us_cities.shp

I realised after running this that I hadn’t added anything to specify the CRS, like I did when importing the first Shapefile via the DB Manager in QGIS. I’m sure that’ll come back to bite me later.

Oh and one more thing, I happened across a useful series of videos for folks like me starting to learn about spatial databases: PostGIS and OpenStreetMap from Ryan Lambert (courtesy of Svelte_mo).