Using The National Map Download Client
In this lesson, we will provide a brief introduction to using the National Map Download Client
interface.
A new page has been added to The National Map Viewer website that serves as a Launch
point to the latest products, services, tools, and documentation related to The National
Map. Please be sure to bookmark this page now for future reference.
You can access the National Map Download Client by clicking on this link under the “Applications”
section. The National Map Download Client will display in a new browser tab or window.
The National Map Download Client is a new web application built on modern web technologies
to take advantage of the USGS staged-product download API and provide users with a more
straight-forward, and feature-rich download experience.
First, let’s show how you can navigate the application interface and the map. Let’s
start with the tool bar at the top of the screen. An online guide to the client is available
by clicking the “How to” link. Clicking on “start over” clears your cart, and
resets the view to a fresh start. The share link button exposes the url at any point in
the session so that you can copy and share the information with someone else. Custom
views provide options for more limited product lists to meet certain user needs and will
be discussed in another lesson. You can zoom in and out with the plus and
minus buttons on the map or using the scroll wheel on the mouse. Move around on the map
by holding the left mouse button down and dragging the map to your Area of Interest.
Use the previous and next extent buttons to go back and forth between map extents. The
Zoom to Initial Extent icon can be clicked to return the map to the initial extent without
removing your areas of interest, footprints or thumbnails. The reload map button on the
other hand, returns to the initial extent and removes drawn areas of interest, footprints
and thumbnails.
The radio buttons indicate what spatial input mode is currently being used. The Search location
box can be used to enter an address, place name or map name to establish an area of interest.
Let’s type in Mount Rushmore. The map zooms to the particular location and the “located
point” radio button is highlighted. If you had already selected a dataset to search you
could click on the find products button on the pop up to view available products. We
will discuss that later in the lesson.
Users who are familiar with map products can turn on the Map Indices by checking the checkbox.
Depending on the current zoom level different map indices will be visible. These include:
1 Degree Index, 15 Minute Index and 7.5 Minute Index.
Use the layer controls to select a base map, view product availability, preview products
and select reference polygons to use in a data search.
The easiest and most straightforward way to define your search area is by defining a point
or a rectangle using the draw point and draw rectangle tools.
To delete a box or point: Click the “Clear AOI” button.
By default, the “Use Map” checkbox and current extent checkbox are checked indicating
whatever area is visible on the map will be used for spatially filtering the product results.
In other words you can use this function plus the pan and zoom to quickly narrow your search.
This can be unchecked to not restrict the products by any spatial filter. You might
want to do this, for example, if you were looking for a particular 8-digit HUC. You
would uncheck the use map check box, type the HUC-8 code in the box below the advanced
search
and click find products.
There are several other ways to use the map to define an area of interest. You can select
from a list of reference polygons to establish an area of interest. The reference polygon
is now your area of interest for the search. Note that the polygons radio button is on
and the code is displayed there also.
In this lesson, we demonstrated the basic features of the user interface in the National
Map download client. This concludes lesson 4a, to continue to the next lesson, please
return to the course homepage.