Category Archives: GIS Maps

Drought Monitor by NDMC, Pakistan Meteorological Department

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National Drought Monitoring Centre (NDMC), Islamabad is serving the nation as a hub for the collection, consolidation and analysis of drought related data from all possible sources in the country; preparing and disseminating monthly drought bulletins & moisture stresses based on various indices; advising government agencies on drought related matters including drought declaration, and conducting research on drought related issues and development of statistical models for improved drought prediction.

Drought Watch corner displays outlook maps and graphs on following important parameters, at national and  regional level as appropriate:

  • Drought Monitor
  • Precipitation
  • Standardized Precipitation Index
  • Soil Moisture Outlook
  • Rain Percentage Anomaly Change
  • Percentage Departure Of Rainfall
  • Cumulative Precipitation Anomaly
  • Soil Moisture Anomaly
  • Water Availability Forecast
  • Rainfall Analysis
  • Length Of Dry Period
  • Drought Hazard Map
  • Drought Frequency Map

Few of these data products are being illustrated here:

NDMC leverages Land surface temperature (°C), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index: NDVI) and Temperature Vegetation Dryness Index as powerful satellite driven indices for monitoring Earth’s surface, overcoming limitations associated with traditional weather station data. These indices enhance understanding of environmental processes and improve resilience. The estimates are made available on NDMC website link: https://ndmc.pmd.gov.pk/new/satellite-indices.php

The availability of weekly, monthly, and quarterly drought bulletins issued by the NDMC is also a valuable resource for monitoring and managing drought conditions. These bulletins provide essential information to stakeholders, policymakers, and the public. By offering insights into drought severity, trends, and potential impacts, they contribute to informed decision-making and preparedness efforts. Once you locate the bulletins, you can download them in pdf format.

As we commemorate World Environment Day 2024 with the theme Land restoration, desertification and drought resilience; it is important to acknowledge the existence and contribution of NDMC Pakistan. However, it is suggested to enhance the outreach of multiple drought related products. It is envisaged that provision of spatio-temporal map products and their statistics in user friendly formats (like *.csv, *.jason, *.geotiff, *.shp etc.) is vital. It would help students and researchers to easily integrate diverse interrelated and interdependent geospatial datasets; develop dynamic data driven products and models, holistic drought monitoring and hazard assessment tools, and drought resilience index calculator etc. at local, national, regional and global scales.

Source: https://ndmc.pmd.gov.pk/new/outlooks.php?p=drought-hazard-map

GIS Service Maps for Municipalities of Punjab Province, Pakistan

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GIS Municipal Services Maps serve as powerful tools for enhancing the effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability of urban governance and service delivery. They enable evidence-based decision-making, promote civic engagement, and contribute to the overall quality of life in cities and municipalities.

With this realization, Punjab Municipal Development Fund Company (PMDFC), Government of Punjab has harnessed GIS technology to meet their goal “Help Build Healthy Cities”. The GIS-based service maps are regularly developed and disseminated under the Punjab Cities Program (PCP) to support planning officers of 16 municipal corporations/committees within Punjab province namely: Bahawalnagar, Burewala, Daska, Gojra, Hafizabad, Jaranwala, Jhang, Jhelum, Kamalia, Kamoke, Khanewal, KotAddu, Muridke, Okara, Vehari and Wazirabad. Here are few screenshots of the original website:


To date GIS thematic maps including base map, roads and chowks; solid waste management; sewerage; street lights; parks, water supply, approved schemes of these targeted MCs are available online for time period 2023-2024, 2022-2023 and 2021-2022 in pdf format (Source: https://pmdfc.punjab.gov.pk/gis-map-16_cities-pcp).

It is noteworthy that Local Government & Community Development (LG & CD) Department also has representation in Board of Directors (BoDs) of PMDFC.

It’s great to have these detailed maps that cover such diverse thematic nature from connectivity to water works to solid waste management to approved future developments etc. within municipality. However, it would be great if such donor funded projects make the GIS data available in open domain to support researchers and stakeholders. In some cases, there is a significant need to improve the cartographic and vector data quality. PakistanGIS user may use the data as provided. These maps will be available at http://geonode.pakistangis.org/ as well.

Map of Katchi Abadis, Lahore

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Junaid Hussain has created this map of Kachi Abadis in Lahore. Image attached contains list and Location of Declared and Un-Declared Kachi Abadis in Lahore with approximate number of units.

The maps shows the declared and un-declared katachi abadis as per LDA record 2011-2012.

Census of Schools with GIS Coordinates

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  1. Punjab

It is lovely to see the Census of Schools conducted by Schools Education Department, Government of Punjab. The online database contains very comprehensive information for more than 55 thousand educational facilities in all districts of Punjab along with locational information.

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Below image shows, how it looks like when plotted in GIS all together at once. Only a few schools (less than 3%) have got missing GIS coordinates or wrongly placed coordinates, but overall it’s a very comprehensive and rich piece of information for those interested in education sector in Punjab.

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2.  Sindh

Reform Support Unit, Education and Literacy Department, Government of Sindh has also done a great job by providing online access to School Census Database and Online GIS coordinates of schools from 17 districts. So far, these districts include Hyderabad, Matiari, Mirpurkhas, Tando Allah Yar, Larkana, Umerkot, Jacobabad, Sanghar, Tando Muhammad Khan, Jamshoro, Dadu, and Shaheed Benazirabad, Khairpur, Sakkur, Kashmore, Shahdadkot and Shikarpur.

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Currently the online database contain coordinates of more than 28 Thousand as of July 2014 educational facilities spreaded over 17 districts. This is how it looks like all together.

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Overall picture look like the image below:

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Peri Urban Structure Plan of Okara City

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A group of urban planning students from University of Engineering and Technology (CRP-10) including M. Aamir Basheer, Imtiaz Hussain, Imran Nawaz, Zohaib Anwar, Iqra Ismail, Rohail Javaid, Ghulam Mustafa, Akram Anwar, Adnan Khan, Aniqa Azam, Areesha Gul has prepared GIS based peri urban structure plan of Okara City using high resolution satellite image. The map includes Points of interest , Existing urban boundary , Existing land uses, Proposed Roads, and Proposed urban block.

This is a true addition to the existing effort on GIS mapping of Okara which was done by Munawar and Nausheen (CRP-08) in 2009. Previous map can be seen HERE.

Okara file

Prei Uran final image

Peri Urban Plan of Hujra Shah Muqeem

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An interesting effort by Muhammad Mashhood and Arif Hussain, students at Engineering University, Department of City and Regional Planning.

Its GIS based map of Hujra Shah Muqeem containing base map, existing land uses, road network, points of interest, existing and proposed urban area boundaries, water bodies and proposed land uses for future growth.

pakistangis_hujra_shah_muqeem

High resolution data on human population distributions in Pakistan

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High resolution, contemporary data on human population distributions are a prerequisite for the accurate measurement of the impacts of population growth, for monitoring changes and for planning interventions. The AsiaPop project was initiated in July 2011 with an aim of producing detailed and freely-available population distribution maps for the whole of Asia. This appears to be the highest resolution data on the subject available in open source as of today.

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Details

Units: Persons per grid square

Projection: Geographic (WGS84)

Spatial Resolution: 0.000833 degrees (~100m at the equator)

Years: 2010, 2015

Versions: (i) Adjusted to match UN national estimates and (ii) Unadjusted

Format: Geotiff (zipped using 7-zip (open access tool)

Pakistan Soil Data based on Shear wave Velocity of 30 meters

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Here is the raster soil layer for the soils based on shear wave velocity of 30 meters.

Vs30 measurements (the average shear-velocity down to 30 m) are correlated against topographic slope to develop two sets of coefficients for deriving Vs30: one for active tectonic regions that possess dynamic topographic relief, and one for stable continental regions where changes in topography are more subdued.  The soil layers that are generated were based on Active Tectonic values.

Read a detailed research paper on the subject:

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For more information check out the USGS Global Vs30 Map Server: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/hazards/apps/vs30/

Airline Route Mapper

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Airline Route Mapper is a Windows program for exploring route maps of over 550 airlines. You can search by airports or airlines.

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Originally available at http://arm.64hosts.com/