GOM3 News - August 2013

ArcGIS 10.2 and BOEM Atlas Release

GOM3 supports ArcGIS 10.2 that was released recently. However, it points to the difficulty of supporting 4 (or 5) versions of ArcGIS software. Right now, the plan is to officially end support for ArcGIS 9.3 and 9.3.1 at the end of 2013. While there won't be any immediate problems with continued use of unsupported software, there is a good chance that some problems will be faced fairly quickly. Plans for enhanced layers will cause some layers not to load. The geodatabase conversion will begin with a version 10.0 file geodatabase. More information will be available at the user conference, but in the end, all remaining 9.3/9.3.1 users are encouraged to upgrade to at least version 10.0 as soon as possible.

1/1/2009 BOEM Atlas Data

The 1/1/2009 Atlas data is included in this month’s update. This includes new outlines for Fields, Pools and Sands and valuable updated attributes as well (porosity, permeability, water saturation, initial temperature, pressure and many other variables). This also includes updated 3D Sands, as shown below.

3-D Sands

Other Additions

There are a few small additions to GOM3 this month. New artificial reef locations are available from NOAA's marine cadastre. These include specific locations off the coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida (to go with the previous Texas locations).
Bathymetry, as shown to the right, is available in both feet and meters. This is used for both the raster grids and contour lines.
There are also new attributes in existing tables. In leases, the number of current aliquots is included. In wells, the field's nickname is now included, in addition to the standard field name/abbreviation. To make the nickname easier to work with, there is also a new addition to the Label Expression Library to label the wells by Field Nickname first and the Field Name if no nickname exists. An example is shown below.

LabelExpression

User Conference Papers

The GOM3 User Conference is a few months away. If you would like to present a paper at this year's user conference, please contact us with your ideas: contactesa@earthsci.com

For a list of past newsletters, click here.