[Tom]

Gregory,

You have the highest resolution version of Natural Earth 1 that is on the Natural Earth Data website and which registers well with the vector drainage and coastline data. The higher resolution version of Natural Earth 1 on my other website does not register well with vectors, mostly because the vectors derive from old WDB2 sources, which are a bit suspect in terms of spatial accuracy, and were further tweaked to fit snugly with the lower resolution Natural Earth rasters. So the upshot is that higher resolution raster data will fit pretty well other more accurate vectors but not the vectors on our site.

I do not have experience with QGIS or GRASS and can’t offer you any advice.

Tom

[Tom]

John,

Following up on your suggestion, I updated the 10m cross-blended hypsometric tints to include a version with ocean bottom data. I hope that you like the results.

Tom

[Tom]

John,

Thanks for your suggestion. Some time ago I experimented adding ocean bottom to cross-blended hypsometric tints and was dissatisfied with the results. Because of the relatively dark lowland tones of cross-blended hypsometric tints, they need a very light water tone in shallow areas to create figure-ground contrast between the land and water. The ocean bottom data is just too dark in the shallows to use as is. However, perhaps with modifications it might work. I’ll give it another try sometime.

Tom

[Tom]

Hi David,

Thanks for your suggestion of serving up the cross-blended hypsometric tints sans the embedded shaded relief. Others have requested the same thing and it is definitely on my list of things to do. However, creating this product is not as simple as you might think because of production short cuts that I took creating the original data and now regret doing. I would need a couple of days to reconstruct the data without the relief. For the next month or two I am busy with other projects, unfortunately.

Tom

[Tom]

Electrify,

Let me echo Nathaniel and say what a nice looking Isle of Man map you made.

We have no immediate plans to add vector hypsometry to Natural Earth, although I looked into creating such a data set. I opted no to do it because of technical problems and a lack of time. River valleys are the main problem. When generalizing contours in narrow river valleys they tend to coalesce and over lap one another necessitating a huge amount of manual editing. Also, generalized contours in valleys also tend close at the narrowest sections creating false depressions upstream instead of linear contours that align to the river.

Creating vector contours for Natural Earth would take about 400 hours to do correctly.

However, other alternatives exist. The easiest and quickest way I know of to create elevation tints is by sticking with raster output. In “render shaded relief” palette of Natural Scene Designer you can specify elevation colors not to blend and turn the shading amount to 0 percent to create nice hypsometric tints. Rendering the tints at high-resolution will help result in sharp elevation breaks, although not as sharp as vector data.

Eduard Imhofs “Cartographic Relief Presentation” by ESRI Press contains several classic color schemes for elevations. Otherwise, I’d just search the web and tinker with colors to create a ramp that I like.

I hope that this helps.

Tom

[Tom]

The 50m and 10m raster data on the NE download page are updated and now contain Hans’ corrected TFW files. I did tests in NSD Pro 5 georeferencing the rasters with the TFW files and reprojecting them. No funny gaps appeared at the 180th meridian.

Please let us know if you still experience reprojection problems. And many thanks for letting us know about this.

Tom

[Tom]

Another thought, ask about this on the CartoTalk.com discussion forum.

Tom

[Tom]

Frank,

Thanks for sending the preliminary WorldWind screen shots, which look very promising. My workflow for rasterizing shapefiles to GeoTIFs would involve Adobe Illustrator, MAPublisher, Photoshop, and Geographic Imager software, all of which are pretty expensive.I would think that freeware or shareware exists for accomplishing what you want to do. Let us know what happens.

Tom

[Tom]

You bring up a good point. When creating the Natural Earth ocean coastline I deliberated whether to include the Caspian Sea with this theme or classify it at as a lake. Because it is so big and salty and bounds multiple countries and is called a sea, I decided to include with the ocean coastline despite the fact that it is an interior water body not connected to the world ocean. I thought that a world map of the oceans would look incomplete without the Caspian Sea.

Tom

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