Explore Our Planet

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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While a proper configured WMS server is able to serve tiles off nearly all sizes some clients use an algorythm to stitch tiles with same size together. For example google maps usually request 256×256 px wide tiles.

Using bigger tiles leads to less requests against the server and faster display in your internet browser. On the server side the number of different tiles is no longer endless and a caching is an option. Lucian Plesea extended the WMS protocol to a tiled WMS and speeds up NASA’s JPL OnEarth WMS server.

The new map pack (1444) provides all served maps from this capabilities file except the single monthly Blue Marble Next Generation. Most interesting is Daily Terra combined with the 2007 version of Blue Marble as background. Daily Terra is updated every day and the colors match perfectly BMNG.

This map pack requests 512×512px sized tiles, the performance is much better than the standard OneEarth WMS - zooming and moving means more fun now. Unfortunatly WMS overlays do not work with this projection (for now), but all point data (placenames, weather, tropical storms, videos, hotels, photos, … ) are displayed at the right place.

In the edition of last week the Economist mentioned ExploreOurPla.net :

ExploreOurPla.net brings together thousands of sources of images and data to let users investigate climate change.

The articles describes the new possibilities of combining latest Web 2.0 technologies with geo information.

1 liter gasoline/petrol - burnt in a car - emitts about 2.3 kilogramm carbon dioxyde. Diesel even more: 2.6 kg CO2. Only 10 per cent of the fuels energy are effectively used to transport you. The rest is wasted for moving iron , tires and oil.

Of course cars must be safe, but in no car you have a chance to survive a crash with 120kph. So why is it fun to drive with death speed? However if you really need your own car and car sharing is not an option, check out climate friendly cars.

ExploreOurPla.net mirrors from now the car fuel database of the Vehicle Certification Agency based in UK. 3,300 models from Alfa Romeo to Volvo all with CO2 emissions per kilometer.

The winner is the Prius build by Toyota with its hybrid engine and 104 g/km CO2. To compare: the 2001 Roadster L144 from Lamborghini emitts 520 g same distance.

The famous mySql database driving this site will be upgraded in the next days to version 5 - same with PHP. There may be some hick-ups. Please be patient - it is worth to wait for the geo extensions and a performance boost.

Just in case you are wondering servana.de has a reasonable pricelist, confixx as admin interface, awstats for analyzing traffic, a friendy support and this major update for free.

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

It looks like somebody uses @exploreourpla.net as sender address to send bulk mails (spam). The admin mailbox is full of returned to sender mails. Is it that easy to hijack a mail account? Actually I was thinking switching to Google mail for domains is safe.

To everybody affected by unsolicited mail, I have to say sorry for any unconvenience. It was never my intention to assist spam sender. I hope somebody can enlighten me on how to stop this impertinent behaviour. Many thanks in advance.

Since yesterday the OnEarth server of Jet Propulsion Laboratory is not working and the Daily Aqua and Terra satellite photos are not available. Hopefully all technical problems get solved and the archive will be online soon.

However latest level 2 images are still published at http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/

Update:The server is now working again and even the archive is not lost. I have to say thanks to Lucian Plesea, who drives this project.

Daily satellite pictures are not only useful, they show the impact of the weather on a bigger scale. With 250m per pixel resolution changes in land use, fires in amazon rainforest, huricanes and typhoon and ice shelfs are visible. With an interactive map interface climate changes become observable.

The project needs support: harddisks, time, money and publicity are helpful to ensure its continuation.

Here you can see everyday the earth and what has been captured by Daily Terra and prepared the day before:

I gave Opera with version 9.02 (Win32) a try as third browser to have a fresh set of cookies and find out the interface looks far better than last version I’ve seen, two years ago. Lacking a Javascript debugger it is still not a choice for developer, but ExploreOurPla.net behaves more reactiv - Opera displays, loads and caches very fast.

There are differences with CSS (letter-spacing and font-size). Opera’s DOM event approach knocked out zooming with the Google Maps. Now each big browser has its own routine.

I started site and testing with Opera for registered, IE for admins and FireFox for all and unregistered WordPress users. A big bug stopping registered users from using full screen map was found and fixed.

If you find further annoying bugs simply add a comment here or somewhere.

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.