Explore Our Planet

I was quite excited while visiting this UN site: data.un.org. You’ll find a huge amount of figures provided by different UN agencies. The data is free to use, ready to download and presented by a slick WEB2.0 interface. Of cource data from the UNFCCC is there as well as from the american Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC).

The latter provides a data set with CO2 emissions from more than 200 countries ranging from 1980 to 2004. I’ve jumped at this chance and started to develop google maps overlayed with colored countries. SVG was a dead-end, so the next question was how to generate tiles without having any record in hand painting.

GMapCreator was developed by the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London under the GeoVUE (Geographic Virtual Urban Environments) project which is funded as one of the research nodes of the National Centre for eSocial Science (NCeSS).

In short it picks a shape file, let you colorize the polygons according to their attributes and renders all the tiles down to the level you specify. The world borders shape file from thematicmapping.org (credits to: Bjorn Sandvik, Schuyler Erle, Sean Gilles) was the best solution for this job. The simple version has enough points for a use with level 4. Btw: Quantum GIS is an excellent application for beginners.

Since human senses use logarithmic scales this is the way the map was designed. Also it is easier to distinguish different shades of green than blue. The values correspond to metric kilo tons of CO2.

Blue means no data, countries with an output over one billion tons are colored with dark red. Within these color groups GMapCreator shades the countries according to their past emissions. As a rule of thumb you may say the countries in the orange group emitted 10 times more C02 than the yellow countries.

At first sight the information provided by this interactive map is little: huge countries emit more C02 compared to smaller countries. But given the scale factor it indicates the countries with the most potential to fight Climate Change. Nevertheless the next map in this series will visualize emissions per capita and the United States will then - together with some litte arabian countries - lead this unreasonable competition.

However, this is not the end of this story. CO2 resides for approximatly 100 years in the atmosphere, so taken into account historical emissions will answer the question whose emissions are still heating the planet. Can responsibility-based politics really ignore past emissions?

Stay tuned on this channel.

The NEO Project (NASA Earth Observations) provides an advanced flash interface, map download, analysis features and a full fledged OGC WMS server. The range of available layers are all related to Climate Change and Global Warming.

As a first try ExploreOurPla.net implements 5 layers with interesting data. All of them show combined data of last full month. This leads to full coverage since clouds are elimated. See following examples with direct links to the map interface and the description taken from layer abstract (credits go to NASA).

This map shows the temperature of Earth’s lands during the daytime. Temperature is a measure of how warm or cold an object is. During the day, the Sun’s rays warm Earth’s lands. Some of this warmth rises into the air where gases catch and hold the warmth near the surface. These gases (called greenhouse gases) also help to warm Earth’s land surface.

We can use a thermometer to measure the temperature of any single place. Likewise, scientists can measure the temperature of the whole world from space using instruments carried on satellites. Scientists want to know the land’s temperature for many important reasons. For example, in places where it is too hot or too cold food crops may die.

Temperature also influences weather and climate patterns. So, mapping the temperature of Earth’s lands helps scientists to better understand our world.
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The Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) integrates remote sensing and GIS technologies to deliver MODIS active fire locations to natural resource managers and other stakeholders around the World in near real time. With a resolution of 1 square kilometers the service detects fires or thermal anomalies (volcanoes, …).

Fire detection is performed using a contextual algorithm that exploits the strong emission of mid-infrared radiation from fires. Under ideal conditions the smallest flaming fire that can be routinely detected is approximately 50 m

Quite a lot of AJAX desktops popped up since Web2.0. NetVibes is most flexible, has a mini API and accepts external moduls. First attempts of integrating ExploreOuPla.net as iframe failed, the full screen interface is not optimized for small windows.

But having a deeper look into the documentation I found netvibes runs a nearly full abstraction layer and started implementing a subset of the OGC WMS specification to have a nice daily satellite photo viewer at the end.

At first time loading the modul does not knows what to show. It should geolocate the user via ip address or fall back to Paris, France. Geonames runs a webservice with the Maxmind GeoLite City dataset and achieves 97% accuracy for countries.

AJAX can not transport browser’s ip address because the netvibes proxy has its own. Dynamic Javascript is needed but Netvibes evaluates only static javascript without a scr attribute. So now the modul creates a dynamic Javascript using DOM during load.

You may give the modul its own tab with one column only and enjoy bigger photos.

Or you load the modul several times in a multi column layout to watch more different places.

Three maps are available: Daily Terra, Daily Aqua and cloud free Modis Blue Marble as reference. All are fetched from the NASA OnEarth WMS server. At any time you can change to the EOP full screen interface by clicking on the location link.

Depending on your timezone and choosed area the daily maps are not older than 48 hours. Normally they get updated at 10AM GMT. Sometimes access to server is restricted due to overload.

Have fun, check out example netvibes tab or add the module to your desktop.

Google has now indexed more than 10,000 pages of ExploreOurPla.net and offers on-site search results.

Not only to reduce server load I’ve disabled the internal wordpress search and let now Google do the work. Example: Search results for Tuvalu (more…)

It is a while ago after last explorer update. Latest multimedia extension was audio from the Freesound Project. I’m interested for a long time in digital video and so videos on the map was in the pipeline from the beginning of this project.

Now here is the complete list of all multimedia extensions:

• New: geotagged Videos from VlogMap.org
• New: geotagged Videos from YouTube.com
• geotagged Sounds from FreeSound Project
• Podcasts with geoFeedExplorer

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Google AdSense Quality Team has forced me to change the layout of the map explorer. Now there is a toolbar on the right side with permallink and clickmap. Registered Users will find the permalink in the info section of the flyout menu .

I’d like to say thanks, they gave me 72 hours to make the changes. On the bad side: only registered users can experience the full screen Google Map from now. But I think first time users will appreciate better placed map controls.

Any ideas or proposals? Use the comment function!

This is just an announcement and the supporting post for the tutorial describing how to implement labeled permalinks for Google Maps. Read everything about here and use the comment function below for questions and proposals:

Tutorial for labeled permalinks, latest code version (2006-08-14)

Wordpress has no comment function for pages and registered users only can submit comments to avoid spam. Sorry for any inconvenience.

If you are wondering read ‘Maps now with location detector and labeled permalinks’ for your information and find out how this widget helps you on the map.

In the upper right corner ExploreOurPla.net now has a location detector. It displays the location of the center of the map and provides a labeled permalink ready for your bookmarks and mails.

After every move ExplorerOurPla.net connects to geonames.org, sends the current coordinates and retrieves country, city and administration regions whenever appropriate from the hierarchy service at geonames.org. Of course in the middle of an ocean or a lake no results are available and the coordinates are used instead.

The geonames.org service tries to find a city within a radius of 50 kilometer, otherwise an uninhabited place is indicated. For the US the resolution goes down to street level. The administration regions are available for a lot of countries and help to disambiguate cities with same name in same country.

You may drag the link inside the location detector on your desktop or into your list of bookmarks. It is automatically labeled correctly, so in future you have no longer learn by heart the coordinates of your places of interest.

The location detector works very fast and gives result within milliseconds. It works in both FireFox and Internet Explorer (tested with FF 1.5 and IE 6.0). All enabled extensions, tools and overlays from your current view are included with the permalink. Unregistered users also have a small Google AdSense window attached to the detector.

Update:
There is now a tutorial and code available desribing how to implement labeled permalinks with your map. Download the all-in-one-file solution with AJAX requester, example and Javascript.

As announced yesterday Google Maps now includes an API to provide geocoding.

When you want to see a place on the map, simply write the address in the box and hit enter. When Google finds something the explorer opens and gives you an overview of the searched place.

You can try countries (’Italy’, ‘Germany’, ‘Vatican’, ‘Andorra’, ‘Poland’) or cities (’Köln’, ‘New York’) and even addresses (’Bonnerstr Köln’). Though it seems service is still changing and sometimes gives results and sometimes not using same search string. I will check it out next week again, when it is more stable and add a better zoom detector and a place indicator.

Street-level geocoding is available for the US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan. More countries will be added as Google Maps launches in new countries.

The geocoder returns one place only, while geonames.org finds for example 350 toponyms called ‘Paris’. In this case I’m happy with the choosen place, don’t blame me when you find your place of birth on a different continent, choose the toponym search instead and scroll through the list, which is quite comfortable when you’re already on the map.

Will get updated next week……