Explore Our Planet

Satellite picture taken by Daily Terra, 2006-07-29, showing one of an incrementing amount of dust storms in this region caused by extreme summer heat.
via: Modis

Today latimes.com starts a five parts interactive Flash presentation about the fundamental changes of the oceans. During his 5 years exploration Kenneth R. Weiss documented the impact of human civilisation like overfishing and nutrients influx.

First part shows how in many regions the altered chemical balance leads to explosive growth of marine algae, bacteria and jellyfish and pictures low oxygen dead zones.

The series continues every day with impressive photos, videos and graphs and substantiate how the transformation of the source of all live on this planet affects us all.

Part One: A Primeval Tide of Toxins

Nice reading about the not yet finished sommer of records 2006 and latest heatwave 2003.

Kim Wilsher and Jack Shenker collected interesting facts about overheating and casualties, how people in Greece and Britain behave different and what you may expect from the upcoming summers around 2040 when mean temperature rises a single degree.

But read ‘boiled alive’ at Guardian’s webpage yourself and get also tips about staying in health, when blood and air heat meet beyond 100°F.

via: Environmental Journalism Today

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.

About 800 people were evacuated from their homes, over 800 households experienced water shortage and over 81,000 experienced power shortages, according to the National Disaster Prevention and Protection Commission under the Executive Yuan. Flooding was reported in five areas in Pingdong County, the commission said.

Because of rock falls and landslides, traffic in 14 locations in Hualian, Taidong, Kaohsiung and Pingdong counties was blocked, and as of 3 p.m. on Tuesday only two sites had been reopened.

According to Council of Agriculture estimates, agricultural losses caused by Typhoon Kaemi hit over NT$73 million, with the bulk of the damage occurring in eastern and southern Taiwan. Fruit crops such as pomelos, persimmons, bananas and sugar apples were heavily damaged, the COA said.

[ Taiwan Headlines ]

… more than 435,000 people were evacuated from Fujian, while another 80,000 were moved from their homes in neighbouring Zhejiang Province.

About 44,000 fishing boats were ordered to return to harbour by yesterday, while flights from Xiamen city were postponed or cancelled.

Fujian is ready with 12,000 tents, 50,000 quilts, 80,000 items of clothing and a five-day supply of food for 300,000 people, Xinhua said.

In Shantou alone, more than 2,700 ships have returned to harbours, with all fishermen leaving the vessels by noon yesterday.

The nation is still counting the dead and picking up the pieces in the aftermath of Typhoon Bilis, which swept through five provinces including Fujian less than two weeks ago.

[ chinaview.cn, photos ]

Region of China and Taiwan with storm extension enabled. Observed by Daily Aqua, 2006-07-25, showing pathes of tropical storms Jelawat, Ewiniar, Bilis and Kaemi.

Several parts of Europe and of the United States are experiencing a heat wave. Governments are taking action to prepare communities for the potential impacts of the record high temperatures. Britain experienced on Wednesday 19 July its hottest day for the month of July, with temperature reaching 36.3 °C, beyond the previous records reached in 1911.

According to Germany’s National Meteorological Service, many parts of the country may be exposed to the highest temperatures since the earliest temperature records available for Germany for the month of July.

According to the U.S. National Weather Service, temperatures will average above normal in the southern and central parts of the country in August. Temperatures will be well above normal over eastern Texas, according to the monthly forecast.

[ World Meteorological Organization ]

Link: NRT Weather Images from different satellites (NRL Monterey Marine Meteorology Division)

With the help of a polish user K. Ciszewski we finally have some results in geotagging polish rss feeds.

If you like to improve the geotagging service and see more polish news on the map, the build in feedback mechanism is your choice. Simply mark a word/place and click OK for good hits, NOK for a correction and Suggest to propose.

Your input is instantly send back to geonames.org and improves the database of the natural-language-geocoder.

Here are some feeds about environmental topics ready to try out:

These web services provide help in translating words and phrases:

http://portalwiedzy.onet.pl/tlumacz.html?tr=ang-auto
http://www.translate.pl/

While still under attack by Israeli forces tens of thousands of people flee Lebanon for their lives. Picture, taken by Daily Aqua, 2006-07-17, shows burning oil refineries near the coast.

via: Deutsche Welle, Detroit Free Press, Antiwar.com

Wildfire in California, 2006-07-13, observed by Daily Terra. A recently published report asserts a positive feedback effect between wildfires and global warming.
via: cbsnews.com, missoulian.com, MODIS Aqua

Some impressive photos of the red sky are available in this forum thread.

ExploreOurPla.net is beta testing the new Google Mail for Domains and I can offer five mail acounts for free to anybody interested. Just send a mail to admin {at} ExploreOurPla.net, first in - first out.

You will get the mail address you like, may use Google Spreadsheet, Google Calendar, have 2 GB space for your mails and a spam and ad free fast interface (hint).

Of course only you can see and read your mails. After summer there will be more accounts available.