Explore Our Planet

The Google Earth Plugin turns browsers into full Earth browsers. Well, not supported is UNIX, Apple, but FireFox and Internet Explorer running on Windows 2000 or better. The API of the plugin is well supported and this site will have a progressing amount of features available in 3D. First achievement is the Daily Planet map provided by NASA’s OneEarth server.

The current implentation is far from complete and a lot of further work is ahead. Especially registered users will find out that the plugin does not allow to use the flyout menu any longer and switching maps is a challenge. Please log out in this case or prepare the geoLinks you need in advance. As an another aspect the overlays do not work with Google Earth as base map. However seeing the Planet is no longer flat is exciting. Expect far more improvement in usability and data soon.

The navigation is quite simple: just try all mouse buttons, double click or drag the globe.

geoLink 1515 links exclusively to the North Atlantic Ocean showing the daily status of upcoming hurricanes.

Feeling the heat, missing snow, want to go skiing? Try out this interactive Antarctica simulation build with flash 3d.

via: Ehrensenf

The Arctic sea ice conditions are now very similar to last year. The maritime shortcuts through the Artic Sea are almost open or already open. The total extent two days before - the NSDIC reported yesterday - was 5.47 million square kilometers.

Buoys indicate surface melting is coming to an end while bottom melting of the ice will continue a few more weeks.

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.

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.

Up to 80 different fires claimed already more than 50 lives in Greece, Europe. Yesterday Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis declared a nationwide state of emergency, mobilizing all resources.

International help started arriving today, with planes or firemen from France, Italy, and Cyprus and more help expected from Serbia, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. Since June more than 3,000 fires have razed thousands of hectares of forests and scrubland across the country - nearly triple last year’s total - according to officials.

The smoke ranges from Greece to Tripolis, Lybia. Photo captured by Daily Terra - 2007-08-25.

Currently the amount of wildfires in Europe is scary. Though mostly inflamed by business interests or to satisfy the desire for revenge the weather conditions are to blame for spreading and impact.

At present the gallery of Modis shows more satellite pictures of wildfires all over the planet. Picture above is from NASA’s MAP ‘06 Project

The Black Sea forms an enclosed basin, located between south-eastern Europe and Asia Minor. In this satellite picture, captured by Daily Terra , 2007-02-24, cold wind from North-East condensates water vapour in warmer air over the sea and forms clouds.

Cyclone Favio made landfall Thursday in southern Mozambique with powerful winds over 200kph, heavy rains and new misery to tens of thousands of people already forced from their homes by flooding.

About 30 people were killed in Mozambique and nearly 90,000 forced from their homes by the floods. The government said 37,000 people were being housed in tented camps before Favio struck.

Mozambique’s worst disaster occurred recently in 2000-2001 when a series of cyclones caused flooding in southern and central parts of the country, killing 700 people and forcing close to half a million to leave their homes.

A second cyclone, called Gamede, is also expected to make landfall today. Depression 16s is still unnamed and may become tropical storm Humba.

Picture credit: Naval Research Labaratory Satellite view is updated daily.

Update: UNOSAT provides a map for the humanitarian community:
Zambezi Flood Monitoring Change Detection near Muturara [jpg, 3mb]

On February 6, 2007, Terra satellite shot this impressive picture showing cloud streets caused by strong wind over the Sea of Okhotsk. During the winter this part of Siberia is frozen and large chunks of sea ice float on the water.

More at Earth Observatory: Sea of Okhotsk or at Modis Web