GIS Weekly Brief: May 27–June 2, 2025
This past week has been dynamic for the GIS and geospatial community, marked by significant advancements in satellite applications, critical environmental monitoring, and powerful software updates. From enhancing flood prediction with digital twin technology to refining lidar data accuracy and leveraging GIS for critical environmental assessments, the industry continues to demonstrate its vital role in understanding and shaping our world. The diverse developments across these areas underscore how Geographic Information Systems serve as a foundational technology, enabling a wide array of fields from environmental science and disaster preparedness to infrastructure management and the burgeoning autonomous systems sector. This overarching utility reinforces GIS’s increasing strategic importance across various sectors, highlighting its pervasive and critical nature in addressing real-world challenges. Here’s a brief overview of the most impactful developments:
Key Geospatial News & Trends:
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NOAA Satellites Advance Inundation Mapping with Digital Twin Technology
A concept study by NOAA’s Satellite and Information Services (NESDIS) Joint Venture Partnerships, authored by Orion Space Solutions, suggests that digital twin technology can significantly enhance NOAA’s weather monitoring and modeling capabilities. This innovative approach creates a digital simulation of a real physical system, allowing researchers to rapidly build and examine various potential weather scenarios. This promises to deliver “last-mile insights” for interacting with NOAA’s extensive data catalog, ultimately improving flood prediction and preparedness for communities across the U.S.. This development represents a strategic shift in GIS applications, moving towards predictive geospatial analytics for proactive decision-making and disaster preparedness.
Published: June 2, 2025
Seeing Tomorrow’s Floods Today: The Role of NOAA Satellites in Inundation Mapping | NESDIS | National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service -
Pacific Northwest Tribal Nations Face Intensifying Drought Conditions
A special edition drought status update for Pacific Northwest Tribal Nations, published by Drought.gov, highlights the severe impact of warm and dry conditions across the region. Rapid snowmelt and increased evaporative demand have led to an early start to the fire season and a concerning decline in streamflows, threatening water supplies for the summer. Drought and abnormal dryness have expanded across tribal lands, with the Washington Department of Ecology declaring a Drought Emergency for parts of the Yakima Basin. This report underscores the indispensable role of GIS in real-time environmental monitoring, detailed impact assessment, and critical resource management, particularly in the context of escalating climate change impacts.
Published: June 2, 2025
Special Edition Drought Status Update for Pacific Northwest Tribal Nations | June 2, 2025 | Drought.gov -
USGS Validates High Accuracy of Lidar Data for 3D Elevation Program
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center has published a validation report on the geometric accuracy of airborne light detection and ranging (lidar) data collected in eastern Iowa in 2019. This data, part of the national 3D Elevation Program (3DEP), underwent rigorous assessment, evaluating interswath accuracy, same surface precision, point density, absolute accuracy, and consistency with adjacent datasets. The findings confirm that the lidar data meets or exceeds quality level 2 specifications, ensuring high-fidelity elevation models crucial for a wide array of GIS applications. This validation highlights the paramount importance of robust data quality assurance and adherence to established industry standards, which underpins trust and confidence in all downstream GIS outputs and analyses.
Published: June 2, 2025
https://www.usgs.gov/publications/validation-geometric-accuracy-airborne-light-detection-and-ranging-data-eastern-iowa -
Waymo’s Autonomous Vehicles Expand Mapping Efforts Across U.S. Cities
Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving car company, is rapidly expanding its mapping and testing operations across the United States, including new cities like Orlando, Houston, and San Antonio. This aggressive expansion signifies a crucial inflection point in the adoption curve of autonomous vehicle technology, where the novel is becoming increasingly normal. This growth is directly driving an exponential demand for highly detailed, continuously updated, and real-time geospatial data, solidifying mapping as a core component of future mobility. Waymo’s rapid expansion fundamentally underscores that high-precision, real-time mapping and dynamic geospatial data are not merely supporting components but the absolute fundamental backbone of autonomous vehicle technology.
Published: June 2, 2025
Waymo's innovation-adoption curve is at an inflection point; The future points to Waymo and Tesla dominating the ride-hailing space; Uber and Lyft might be 'doomed AI victims' | Articles | Stansberry Research -
ArcGIS StoryMaps: National Park Service Shares Tips for Promoting Recreation Destinations
The U.S. National Park Service (NPS) has showcased how ArcGIS StoryMaps can be effectively used to create immersive virtual experiences, promoting recreation destinations and critical conservation efforts. The San Juan Island National Historical Park successfully leveraged the platform to create “Discovering San Juan Island’s Natural Diversity,” integrating diverse media like GIS technologies, video, and high-resolution photography. The project emphasized interactive features like 3D scenes to deeply engage visitors and highlighted the importance of incorporating local voices and expert input. This development highlights a significant trend in GIS: the evolution from static maps to dynamic, multimedia-rich storytelling platforms that democratize geospatial communication.
Published: June 2, 2025
Promote your recreation destination: Get storytelling tips from the National Park Service
Tools & Tips
The past week has seen notable advancements in GIS software, with Esri releasing updates that enhance productivity and address specific industry challenges. These tools reflect a continuous focus on improving data integrity, workflow efficiency, and specialized functionalities for GIS professionals.
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ArcGIS Pro 3.5 Update: Enhanced Productivity for GIS Professionals
Esri’s ArcGIS Pro 3.5 introduces a suite of new features designed to boost productivity and streamline common GIS workflows. A key enhancement is the COGO Reader, which uses optical character recognition (OCR) to automatically extract deed dimensions from PDFs or images, significantly reducing manual data entry. The new “Append to Existing” option in geoprocessing tools allows users to update datasets incrementally without altering their schema, ensuring clean data management. This update, along with expanded support for Parquet files and NoSQL databases, enhances data quality, analytical capabilities, and the overall user experience for GIS professionals.
Your ArcGIS Pro Update (May 2025) -
ArcGIS Utility Network 2025 Network Management Release: Streamlined Data Migration and QA/QC
The latest ArcGIS Utility Network release, coinciding with ArcGIS Pro 3.5, introduces significant enhancements for managing complex utility infrastructure data. A major highlight is the new Migration toolset and Utility Network Migration Wizard, designed to simplify and accelerate data migration into a base utility network model. This release also bolsters built-in quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) features, allowing users to discover and report errors before enabling network topology, ensuring higher data quality. Furthermore, it enables the inclusion of related record field values in trace and subnetwork export outputs and supports robust offline editing and tracing capabilities.
What's new for the ArcGIS Utility Network with the 2025 Network Management Release
Fun Fact
Did you know that the roots of modern Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can be traced back to the mid-19th century? In 1854, physician John Snow famously used mapping to trace the origin of a severe cholera outbreak in London back to a single contaminated water pump. By meticulously plotting cholera cases on a map, he visually demonstrated the spatial correlation between the illness and the water source, leading to the removal of the pump handle and effectively stopping the epidemic. This early, groundbreaking application of spatial analysis showcased the profound power of geographic data to solve critical real-world problems, long before computers or digital mapping were even conceived!
History of GIS | Timeline of the Development of GIS
We’d love to hear from you!
Have you participated in any GIS events or utilized new GIS tools recently? Share your experiences or insights with us—we’re featuring selected community voices in next week’s edition.