Web Map Viewer

The Flathead Basin Online Map Viewer is a simple viewer that runs in your web browser. You may zoom in to any location in the basin, select which data you want to view, and get information from the databases. It allows you to browse the Flathead Basin data, including the color aerial photos, infrared aerial photos, contour lines, and a shaded relief image of the Digital Elevation model, along with other Montana Framework data layers such as land owners, geographic names, roads, municipal boundaries, 2005 color orthophotos, and USGS topographic maps.

To launch the application go to http://gisportal.msl.mt.gov/Flathead_2009

The viewer usually opens with the Flathead Basin in a small corner of the available map area. To zoom closer, use the zoom tool  to draw a box around the area you want to see or use the full extent tool  to zoom to the basin's extent. If you have used the viewer recently, it may open up zoomed to the location you were last looking at.

If the viewer opens with "No Data" displayed faintly in the map area, this usually means that the map service has gone to sleep, but it will usually respond to a second request. You may have to close all of your browser windows and try to open the site again to make your browser send a new request to the server rather than simply re-loading the "No Data" response it had previously received.

The Map Contents tab on the left side of the viewer lets you pick layers and sub-layers to turn on and off. This section is fairly extensive and complicated-looking because of the large number of layers that automatically become available at different scales as you zoom in to where it is reasonable for the viewer to try to draw those layers. If you open enough of the checkboxes, you will eventually get to the individual data sets and a picture legend showing what they look like on the map.

The identify tool allows you to click on any point covered by the landform image to get the elevation and land owner name at that point. This tool seems to work faster if you zoom in very close to the area you want to click (so that the scale bar is showing a distance of less than 200 Feet). The tool tries to show you the results for all features within a few pixels of where you click, so zooming in close also prevents you from seeing a large number of results and not knowing which one was exactly at the location you clicked. The results window is quite small -- you can promote any result to the larger "Results" pane on the left side of the map by clicking on the layer name and then selecting the "add to results" link.

Please see the Help File for additional help with the map application.