WMS Access

A Web Map Service (WMS) provides spatial data directly to clients. This means that you can access our imagery through your own WMS-compliant software rather than through our online viewers. In fact, you could access data from several services (ours and national weather information from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet, for example) at the same time and overlay them on top of one another. The URL of our WMS server is:

http://earth.gis.usu.edu/wms/utah?

Our data can be requested in the following geographic projections: unprojected in both NAD83 and WGS84, UTM Zone 12N in NAD83, and State Plane Utah North, Central, and South in NAD83.

Many commercial GIS software packages, such as ArcGIS, can utilize Web Map Services. To the left are links to some free GIS software packages.

Directions for accessing the Virtual Utah WMS with ArcMap 9.x:

  1. Open the Add Data dialog.
  2. In the Look in pulldown menu, choose GIS Servers (near the bottom).
  3. Double-click on Add WMS Server.
  4. URL is http://earth.gis.usu.edu/wms/utah?
  5. Click on Get Layers to make sure it worked.
  6. Click on OK.
  7. Now you'll be back in the Add Data dialog and your new WMS connection will be highlighted. Click Add.
  8. Double-click Virtual Utah. It will take a while because ArcMap loads all layers by default.
  9. Expand the legend to see which layers are available. Turn off the ones you don't want in order to speed things up.

In the future, your Virtual Utah connection will show up under GIS Servers and you won't have to repeat steps 3-6. Note that if you're behind a firewall your proxy settings for Internet Explorer must be set up correctly in order for this to work.