BEST PRACTICES FOR CREATING CLEAN GEOTIFF MAP PRODUCTS EXPORTED FROM ARCMAP LAYOUT USING GDAL UTILITIES

The use of cellphones and portable devices equipped with GPS-enabled applications has increased the demand for digital map files with geospatial location information. In an attempt to increase utility to geologic map products, many state geological surveys now offer an additional digital format; the Georeferenced Tagged Image File Format (GeoTIFF). The creation of GeoTIFFs using ESRI’s ArcGIS software can sometimes result in slanted raster images that contain black collars of NoData not ideal for public delivery. Unlike ESRI’s ArcGIS Pro, its predecessor ArcMap has limitations for exporting certain file formats posing a problem for those who have not yet migrated to the new platform. Through state and federal collaboration, a python script was developed for the creation of clean GeoTIFF map products exported from ArcMap layout by further processing raster images using open source command line Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) utilities. The script pulls transformation and projection information from a garbled ArcGIS geospatial PDF, applies it to a clean non-geospatial ArcGIS TIF, and exports the resultant raster as a GeoTIFFwith LZW compression suitable for public delivery.