Time-Enabled Rasters

Visualizing change over time is an effective way to analyze local or global trends and predict future scenarios.

In GIS, much information of this type—for example, sea-surface temperature, annual births, labour market statistics, vegetation type, land-use data—is commonly stored in raster format, and it’s very useful to see these data animated. So how do you make your rasters time-aware? An easy way to is to take advantage of two new features available in Version 10: time-enabled layers and the mosaic dataset.

Follow these steps to create an animation showing change in sea surface temperature over time, or vegetation change in South-West QLD. There’s a tonne of data to show change over time—and now we have an easy way to visualize it in ArcGIS!

Multiple year orthophoto’s in a mosaic dataset

Your organization may have a collection of aerial photography from three years, such as 1995, 2005, and 2008 and you want to publish these as a web service. These may have different resolutions, such as 1 meter, 2 feet, and 0.5 feet. The earliest collection could be a panchromatic in a Geographic projection and the other two are color in a UTM projection.

The best way to manage this data is as separate source Mosaic Datasets and Derived Mosaic Datasets in a Geodatabase. Using source and derived Mosaic Datasets generally makes the management easier while maintaining best performance.