Explore Our Planet

Environmental Defense a national nonprofit organization released a report with a focus on emmisions of CO2 caused by traffic in the U.S. In 2004 the amount from personal vehicles totaled 314 million metric tons. The transportation sector is responsible for about one-third of carbon dioxide production and account for 45% of global automotive CO2 emissions.

Fixing the global warming problem without making cars more efficient is like trying to fix a leaky roof without a hammer. The leading automakers must accept responsibility for becoming part of the solution.

[Environmental Defense President Fred Krupp]

Calculated for an average household with two mid-sized cars these are 10 tons of pollution per year. If you like to act now and reduce your personal emmisions some tips for economic driving and buying are prepared on their webpage.

A quite interesting masterpiece of interactive education presents the Bradshaw Foundation in collaboration with Professor Stephen Oppenheimer.

The ‘Journey of Mankind’ shows the migration of humans from Africa 160.000 years ago to the present. Now inhabiting all continents Homo Sapiens suffered dramatically from Climate Change during this period.

The eruption of stratovolcano Toba in Sumatra, approximately 71,000 years ago, displaced 800 cubic kilometers of volcanic ash and produced enough smoke, plume and aerosols to cause a volcanic winter with no sun for six years and thus a 1000 years ice age. Apparently the population was reduced to about 10,000 adults. Only in a few tropical niches in Africa and Asia humans survived.

50,000 years later during the last Ice Age Europe and North America were de-populated and again only in few refuges small groups survived. Isolation over generations is a possible explanation for the human diversity in language, culture and genes.

While human genes gets recombinated due to sexual reproduction the ‘power plants’ of our cells called mitochondria have their own DNA. Therefore these endosymbionts enable researchers to have a detailed look at our family tree.

The profound synthesis of the mtDNA and Y chromosome evidence with archaeology, climatology and fossil study documents and visualizes perfectly the interrelation of Climate Change and migration.

Further readings: Caldera of Toba, Human Population Bottlenecks

Via: Great Map, Cartography

Print, cut, fold and glue paper polyhedra to create your own pseudoglobe.

From Tetrahedron to Rhombicuboctahedron:
Carlos A. Furutihas has made map fold-outs in different resolutions and maps. All as PDF and ready for your color printer.

via Ehrensenf.de

Volcanoe Merapi, Java, is still active. Latest satellite picture taken by Daily Terra, 2006-06-15 2:50 UTC, is available in different resolution and channels from Terra/Modis Rapid Response System.

You may use the Mission Control Satellite Overpass Predictor on the Earth Observatory Web site to find out when Aqua MODIS or Terra MODIS will pass overhead next time.

Associates Press launched a hurricane simulator and gives an impression of the power of these weather phenomenas.

Damage is shown on human buildings and trees. It even visualizes effects of storm surge and flooding.

The Saffir/Simpson Hurricane Scale was first proposed in 1971 by Robert Simpson and Herbert Saffir. A scale was needed by organisations to estimate and communicate in advance the gradations of risk. According to Munich Re in 2005 87% of economic losses from natural catastrophes have been caused by windstorms.

While the Saffir-Simpsons Scale is mostly used in the western hemisphere and depends on sustained wind speed, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology measures gusts to determine the category of a typhoon in Pacific or Indian Ocean.

A Cat 1 hurricane equals roughly a Cat 2 typhoon. The western scale starts with 119 km/h and a Cat 5 hurricane must have more than 250 km/h. The strongest wind gust ever recorded in Australia had 267 km/h, measured during the landfall of cycloone Vance, 2002-04-22.

ExploreOurPla.net has an extension to display near realtime data from current and earlier tropical storms on the map. More info about: tropical-storms-cyclones-depressions-huriccanes.html

Further readings: AOML/NOAA FAQ, BoM Australia, Reference.com and Wikipedia.

via: Geospatial air du temps, VerySpatial

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……

Tropical Storm Alberto opens season and may become a cat 1 hurricane. 20.000 people have ordered to evacuate along Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Public Advisory , CBSNEWS.

More than 90% of all news of the world refer to a place on our Planet.

With the latest geoRSS feed reader you can read, listen and view latest news on the map and use links to mentioned places.

The geofeedExplorer displays colored icons for each news entry.

All sources have their individual color and icons and news entries are linked.

Feeds gets analyzed via URL parameter, some examples on usage are listed in this post: interesting-rss-feeds-for-geotagging.html. There is a list for all users with exciting RSS channels, registered users define their favorites in the extended profile editor.

How does this magic work?

The data processing is done at geonames.org and I like to greet Marc from here for his phantastic work.

First ExploreOurpla.net requests a single feed from geonames.org. The RSS feed is loaded and analyzed by a process called natural language geocoding driven by the RSS to GeoRSS Converter.

Many words have several meanings e.g. Java, so an important part is
Place Name Disambiguation. The RSS-to-GeoRSS-Converter checks the grammatical structure plus the context and detects the most interesting word as place or toponym, which may be for example a city, a volcano, a building or a country. All is done within seconds.

Next step searches the right coordinates as latitude and longitude from the 6 million rows database at geonames.org. Then transforming the RSS feed to an geoRSS feed, convert it to a JSON object and send it back to ExploreOurPla.net.

However, natural language processing is not perfect these days with current machines. A feedback process let users send suggestions to improve the geocoding. Geonames.org algorithm has reached an accuracy of better than 90% within a few weeks. Just mark a place name in an entry and click at place NOK (not ok). You may also give feedback when a place is correctly choosen from the algorithm, click OK then.

The commands ‘refresh’, ‘expand’, ‘collapse’ belong to all feeds.

Refresh loads the content fom geonames.org, gets the icon and choses a color.

Expanding a feed shows also the icons an the map, while collapsing hides the icons and feed entries. Clicking on a single entry title has same effect.

Icons and feed entries are linked. A single click opens the geofeedExplorer and sets the focus on the clicked entry. The icons show a mouse over tooltip with the title of the news entry.

An incrementing amount of RSS feeds have audio or video as multimedia content. The geofeedExplorer let users do geoPodCasting without an iPod.

Should I mention that best performance is achieved with FireFox and
Quicktime installed?

Have fun!