Free Desktop WMS clients

Extensions for commercial desktop software

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 desktop packages, such as ArcGIS, can utilize Web Map Services. To the left are some links to free 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 do 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.

 

Configuration files for the ARC3WMS client and Virtual Utah can be found here.

 

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