Making AMLs

I've been very busy lately with the MTBS project. This project is significant: we're mapping every fire larger than 1,000 acres that has burned since 1984. It will continue until 2010 and will include over 16,000 fires. To map these fires, we're acquiring pre- and post-fire Landsat imagery, creating a dNBR, heads-up digitizing the fire perimeter, and then manually thresholding the severity classes in the dNBR to create a final 5-class thematic vegetation severity layer. Many phases of this project are very time consuming and tedious, but will yield very useful information to policy makers.

There are a lot of byproducts from this project that include many automation scripts and models written mostly by a co-worker at RSAC, Brad Quayle. One of them takes the imagery, perimeter, and thresholded severity layer and converts them all to GRID and coverage format (from TIFF and shapefile), then to Adobe Postscript, then to JPEG for publishing purposes on a website. The script takes an input as the year of the fire and then searches through all fires in a year we've mapped and creates the necessary JPEGs. It isn't a super fast script, but it is automated.

I figured it'd be nice to adapt that script for my BAER purposes. With every fire I map, I distribute GIS layers of the imagery and BARC products. I also make screen shots of all the data and include those JPEGs as well (for folks who want to look at the data without having to load them in GIS software). So I spent a good portion of the day today editing the script making it work for my data. It took some work and things that were working perfectly for the MTBS data weren't working for my BAER data (why? I have no idea and it made no sense). Finally, I got a working version before I left work today. The script requires the fire name, prefire image date, and postfire image date as inputs (arguments) to the script. The script is actually an AML and it was fun making it work today.

I can't write many AMLs from scratch, but I have no problem adapting existing ones to meet my needs. I did a similar thing for my metadata creator that I absolutely love and that saves me much time and sanity (making metadata is typically a pain the rear...).