Mapping Industrial Pollution
The Commission for Environmental Cooperation has released a layer for Google Earth mapping point-specific industrial pollution for more than 33,000 facilities in the US, Canada, and Mexico.
Utilizing the Google Earth web mapping service anyone can discover where industries that pollute are located in relation to their homes and schools. Simply download the North American Pollution Release Transfer Register (PRTR) kmz file and open it.
When you open the layer in Google Earth you can click an icon to view a pollution profile for each facility and how these pollutants are handled. The latest data available for these industrial polluter maps is for the year 2004.
The Commission for Environmental Corporation’s Mapping Industrial Pollutants mapping tool empowers us all through the access of information crucial to decision making.
US Civil War Map in Flash
Here is an Historical map rendered in flash depicting the US Civil War in timeline format from start to finish.
Major battles simultaneously mapped as the areas controlled by the Confederate States of American and the United States of America move according to the fortunes of war. A map key constantly updates war causalities of both sides as the war progresses to its conclusion as the music Ashokan Farewell by Jay Ungar, written for the Ken Burns PBS series The Civil War is played.
The flash US Civil War map shows us that Google Maps and the other major online mapping players do not have to be used to create great maps.
Los Angeles Times Homicide Map
The Los Angeles Times online news website has done a great mashup in mapping Los Angeles County homicides online. Updated daily, the homicide map and data are displayed using Google Maps.
You can filter the map by date, place, age, race, gender, cause of death, day of week, and even search by name. The interactive homicide map shows the locations of each event and running your mouse over the icon displays a box with brief information and a link to the related blog post.
But there is more to the LA Times Homicide Map and this is what turns the map into newspaper gold. The Los Angeles Times connects the map to a The Homicide Report blog, an in-depth chronically of LA County homicide victims that contains descriptions of the events and what is being done by local agencies. Of special value is the comments section where readers, friends, and family of the victim often write poignantly of their loss.
One of the best interactive online maps I have viewed, the L.A. Times Homicide Map is a fine example of what can be done with online mapping. More newspapers need to take mapping seriously and add mapping interfaces to their online news reports.
FoxyTag Mobile Phone Speed Camera Signals
This free map tool will come in handy when you want to avoid speeding tickets.
Throughout the world cameras are being installed that serve as speed traps for the unwary. An unwanted side effect however is that drivers are forced to continually watch for speed cameras and often reflexively brake upon seeing one – the cause of many an accident.
The Foxy Tag mapping tool hopes to substantially change that. Drivers post the positions of fixed speed cameras they encounter by simply pressing the 1 key on their mobile phone or the 2 key for mobile cameras. If a speed camera is no longer at that location the driver presses the zero key.
The FoxyTag map data is updated every five minutes. According to the website FoxyTag is legal and non-profit project.
Because many drivers will be confirming the location of each speed camera, trust links are created. Those drivers who map speed cameras more like the other drivers become more trustworthy in the system and their tags are counted as more reliable.
When a driver's GPS position s mapped as being within fifteen seconds of a speed camera an alarm on their mobile phone will go off.
According to Foxy Tag all Java mobile phones with MIDP 2.0 and CLDC 1.1 as well as the Bluetooth library be compatible with the speed camera mapping tool. You can also test your mobile phone for Foxy Tag compatibility with their FoxyTest program.
Synchronized Video and Mapping
Here is a mapping tool that combines online video with online mapping.
To create a video map you record your outdoor activities on video while at the same time recording position with your GPS device. You then upload both the video and the GPS coordinates to the VeoGeo website where the video can be viewed while your changing position is shown moving on a Google Map.
According to VeoGeo you should record the GPS data once per second and have a means of downloading the data to an online computer in GPX format. It also helps to synchronize the times of the camera and the GPS unit.
At this time VeoGeo allows a maximum of a ten minute video or 100MB video sizes. You can view a variety of sample videos on the site. I have to say this opens up a great deal of possibilities in diverse areas such as real estate, hiking and biking, tourism and travel, and a whole lot more. Good job VeoGeo and I hope to see more of this!
According to the VeoGeo website it is still in beta but the mapping and video synchronization seem to working very well. I can hardly wait to try this while hiking especially above treeline in winter so I can show friends and family something about what it is like up there.
Visit the VeoGeo.com website for some interesting examples and give it a try!
Use Satellite Images to Help Find Missing Adventurer
In online mapping at its finest a million eyeballs are needed to scan satellite imagery for any clues that might lead to adventurer Steve Fossett, who has “gone missing” since September 3.
Fresh satellite images of Nevada in the area where Steve Fossett is likely to be have been taken by GeoEye, who bill themselves as the world’s largest remote sensing company. The satellite imagery has been placed on the Amazon Mechanical Turk website on the Help Find Steve Fossett with Google page.
To help scan the satellite imagery for Steve Fossett on the Amazon Help Find Steve Fossett website, you must sign in. If you see something in the images that looks suspicious you can flag it for imagery experts to look at. As an aid you can load the satellite images of the Nevada region into Google Earth using this network link.
This is a great use of publicly available maps and satellite imagery for GeoHacking. As the saying goes “A million eyeballs find all things” and everyone is a GeoHacker to some degree.
This reminds me of a project I did when earning my GIS degree. Using two satellite images of the same area that were taken a year apart, I wrote an algorithm script that detected small scale differences between the two images. It would be an easy matter to do the same with the Steve Fossett satellite images and perhaps programmatically find an area that has disturbed earth or metal parts of an aircraft that were not there the year before.
This locative process is known as Beaconless Search and Rescue, which would work better using using Multi-Spectral Remote Sensing since the aircraft parts and disturbed elements of the crash site would reflect energy differently than the pre-crash site. Though it would take some tweaking to get it right and there would be a certain amount of signal to noise, working with satellite images taken at time prior to Fossett’s disappearance may be able to quickly scan large areas in this way.
NOAA Historical Hurricane Tracks
Hurricane mappers and trackers are a breed apart. If you have ever experienced a hurricane first hand you know the value of the hurricane watchers.
Back during the days of flat paper maps I happened to be on a backpacking trip in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Early one beautiful sunny morning I broke camp near tree line to resume a several day hike. Little did I know that just hours later I would be scrambling down the nearest side trail as hurricane force winds with torrential rain overflowed streams and knocked down trees all around. Luckily I was able to hole up in a lean-to in the valley of the Wild River Wilderness while the hurricane raged all around.
Forward to 2007 and I can go to NOAA’s Historical Hurricane Tracks mapping website where it is easy to generate custom maps on 150+ years of Atlantic hurricane information. Simply enter a zip code, state, county, or lat / long and the years you want to search. Up pops a map depicting the storm tracks as well as a table full of information.
You can also narrow your historical hurricane searches to specific storms, storm categories, years, or months. What is great for mappers and GeoHackers is that the data and metadata can be downloaded as a GIS file for repurposing.
Created by the NOAA Coastal Service Center along with the National Hurricane Center, the Historical Hurricane Tracks website also features a coastal population database so that comparisons can be made between population densities and occurrences of hurricanes between the years 1900 to 2000.
The Historical Hurricane Tracks website also features a Query Expediter tool which creates links you can use on your own web pages to direct your visitors to the hurricane maps you want them to see.
And my hurricane? Hurricane David on September 6, 1979.
Visit the NOAA Historical Hurricane Tracks website.
The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes
If you love medieval mapmaking and exploration as much as do then this is for you. The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes is an Arabic cosmographical treatise compiled in the early 11th century. The only known copy, made in the 12th or 13th century is owned by the Bodleian Library.
The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes includes beautiful maps:
- Diagrams of star groups
- Diagrams of Comets
- A Rectangualar Map of the World with a scale (earliest surviving example)
- A Circular World Map
- Maps showing 5 major rivers
- Many maps of Eastern Mediterranean islands and ports
What is really cool about The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes is that it is available online for free viewing . I especially enjoyed looking at the many ancient maps, which are linked to mouseovers with annotated English translations.
Check out the dedicated The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes website.
Experimental Graphical Tropical Weather Outlook
The National Weather Service National Hurricane Center has an Experimental Graphical Tropical Weather Outlook tool for current tropical weather storms and advisories. The Tropical Weather Outlook tool consists of interactive satellite imagery with highlighted overlays to indicate current locations of weather.
When you mouse over a highlighted area on the satellite image a popup box gives further details about the weather system.
Where appropriate the hotspots are clickable. You are brought to an interactive map with further information on the storm including
- Hurricane wind speed probability
- 50-knot wind speed probability
- Tropical storm wind speed probability
- Maximum wind speed probability
- Warnings and 3-day cone
- Warnings and 5-day cone
- Mariners 1-2-3 Rule
- Wind history
For the East Coast see Atlantic Graphical Tropical Weather Outlook.
For the The Pacific Coast, Pacific Graphical Tropical Weather Outlook.
