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Archive for the 'global warming' Category

Climate Action Day 2009

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
at October 15, 2009 in global warming. 0 Comments

Forgot Climate Action Day was today. Two indispensable links to deal with the standard global warming denial talking points:

How To Talk To A Climate Skeptic

Grist Magazine’s series on standard global warming denial talking points, written in non-technical language, and categorized for easy search and browsing. The first place to look.

RealClimate

A blog run by real climate scientists. Far more technical, and it’s more difficult to find a specific answer, but more authoritative and comprehensive. So, for example, if someone claims that the “hockey-stick” temperature curve has been disproved, you can check out this post, or this post, or this post, or any of the 50+ posts that discuss the topic, for references and graphs that show that’s not true.




Mapping Anthropogenic Biomes

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
at October 1, 2009 in cartography, data and global warming. 0 Comments

Yesterday’s post was about a site that categorized biomes with very fine divisions based on vegetation, soil moisture, surface lithology, etc., all with the underlying concept that for most areas this was a representation of an actual natural biome. The creators of the concept of anthropogenic biomes go in a different direction; they believe that the impact of man upon the natural landscape has been so profound, with only about 11% of the earth’s surface still truly6 wild,  that most of the biomes of the world must be described by at least partially including the effects of mankind. They’ve broken down biomes into just 21 categories:

Anthro_biomes_legend_v2

And created a world map using these categories:

anthrome_map_v1

You can download a PDF of the above image, an ArcGrid file for use in ArcGIS, or a KML file for viewing in Google Earth on this page. Viewed in Google Earth:

anthrobiomes

Also available are map viewers for this data in Google Maps and Virtual Earth (latter didn’t work on Firefox for me).

You can watch a Discovery Channel video on the concept of anthropogenic biomes here.

Via Highly Allochthonous.




High-Resolution Terrestrial Biome Data

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
at September 30, 2009 in data and global warming. 0 Comments

The USGS Global Ecosystems Viewer (background info here) lets you view terrestrial biome data in very fine detail, with extensive categorization levels. Coverage is currently limited to the US, but the background page indicates that the rest of North America, South America and Africa are currently being worked on. Click on the map, and get a popup detailing vegetation classification, lithology, moisture, terrain, and other data:

biomepopup

For this example, the Ecosystems data is:

Ecosystem:
Southern Rocky Mountain Ponderosa Pine Savanna (580)

Topo Moisture Potential:
Dry Uplands (3)

Land Surface Form:
Hills (6)

Surficial Lithology:
Non-Carbonate Residual Material (3)

Isobioclimate:
Upper Supramediterranean Dry (51)

and the Topographic data:

Elevation:
2248 meters

7375 feet

Slope:
8°

Aspect:
102° (E)

You can also do a colored plot of any of the ecosystems parameters by themselves, like this one of the Surficial Lithology:

surfaceforms

With a button to bring up the legend in a pop-up window:

formslegend

Background imagery can be satellite photos (as in the example above) with and without borders and placenames, topographic maps (USGS 100K), or no background at all. Finally, you can order data for your current view for download in georeferenced format (UTM, Albers or geographic projection) in ArcGrid, GeoTiff or ERDAS IMAGINE formats. Data will be prepared and available for download via FTP; you get email notice of this, but there’s also a status update page you can use. When I tried it, the data was ready for download in less than five minutes.

Via Spatial Sustain.




Snow Cover Maps

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
at December 31, 2008 in KML, data and global warming. 2 Comments

So, the week of December 15-19, when I was supposed to be out doing field surveys in northern Arizona, we got snow. A lot of snow. And it kept going until about December 26th. It’s kind of hard to do a field survey when the ground is covered with snow, but I’ve been hoping the recent bout of warm weather would melt that snow quickly, and let me get back out in the field.

To monitor that situation, I’ve been consulting the US National Weather Service’s National Operational Hydrological Remote Sensing Center (with the snappy acronym NOHRSC). At this time of year, they supply a large number of snow-related data products, including:

Continue reading ‘Snow Cover Maps’




Global Map of Human Impacts to Marine Ecosystems

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
at February 15, 2008 in data and global warming. 0 Comments

Matt Perry posts on the release of a 4-year effort he’s been part of to map the effects of mankind on the marine ecosystems of the world. Links on his page point to the announcement article in Science Magazine, media coverage, and the UCSB Global Map of Human Impacts to Marine Ecosystems website that has downloadable KML and raster data for this information. This is incredibly important work, and the results are sobering:

model_small




Clickable World Climate Map

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
at January 21, 2008 in Web apps and global warming. 1 Comment

The World Weather Map lets you click on a location, and get a plot by month of temperature (max/average/min), rainfall, and average number of hours of sunshine. A fourth tab supposedly gives you “Experiences”, a link list of things to do at that location, but the list sometimes includes activities a long distance (> 100 miles) from that location. You can also add an overlay showing what areas are “Hot”, “Warm” or “Wet” for a particular month.

The main website’s map is also flawed in that there’s no zoom feature, so for areas where the climate can change dramatically over a short distance (like the American Southwest), getting the climate for the exact location you want can be difficult to impossible. (1/24/2008: Fixed by the good folks at WorldReviewer; see the comment below) Oddly enough, there’s a widget version of this map that does include a zoom feature, and which can be embedded in any website, as below. Click and drag to move the map; click on +/- to zoom in and out; click on any point to get the climate data for that location:

For more specific climate data, downloadable for any location on the Earth, try some of the applications described in this post. Via GoogleMapsMania.




Glaciers Of The American West

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
at July 9, 2007 in geology and global warming. 0 Comments

Portland State University’s Glaciers Online site has maps, photos and data for glaciers of the American West. Contents include:

  • Shapefiles of glaciers and glaciated regions
  • PDF maps from the 1975 government report “Mountain Glaciers Of The Northern Hemisphere”
  • Glacier photos by location and time, highlighting the gradual retreat of glaciers with global warming
  • A queryable online map
  • Bibliography and links to more general info about glaciers (did you know there’s a glacier in Nevada?!)



Sea Level Rise Google Mapplet

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
at July 1, 2007 in Google Maps and global warming. 3 Comments

From the people who brought you Hey, What’s That? and two Google Mapplets for adding contour lines and terrain profiling to Google Maps comes the Sea Level Rise Visualization mapplet, more advanced than the Flood Maps website mentioned in a previous post. You can set three different flooding levels, and assign different colors to them (red, orange, and yellow):

sea level rise in south Florida

For those diehards out there, you can choose English units (feet) instead of meters, and modify the flooding level numbers and update the map quickly by clicking on the “Go” button. Leaving a level blank omits that color from the map. Here’s an image from south Florida that uses the numbers above:

sealevelrisemap

As the mapplet and my earlier post on Flood Maps point out, there are limitations to this approach deriving from the data. The SRTM data used for this has a spatial resolution of 90 meters, so the results will have a comparable spatial resolution. And SRTM data includes the heights of building and vegetation in the terrain, so urban areas like Miami will have SRTM terrain heights that are higher than the true terrain level, and the flooding level there will be undermapped by this mapplet. You’ll need to use higher resolution data with building/vegetation effects for more accurate results, as is done in this post. But for a quick estimate, this Mapplet does a nice job.Two additional tips on Google Mapplets:

- Google Mapplets aren’t currently accessible from the main Google Maps page; use this Preview link to reach a Google Maps page with an Mapplets tab

- You can reach any Mapplet by creating a single link like this one:http://maps.google.com/ig/add?moduleurl=http://www.heywhatsthat.com/mapplets/sealevel.xml&pid=mpl&synd=mpl; to test it out, just click on the link, and you’ll be given the option of adding this mapplet to Google Maps MyMaps. To create a direct link to any other Mapplet, just replace the text “www.heywhatsthat.com/mapplets/sealevel.xml” with the address of the Mapplet you want to reach. Thanks to Mike Kosowsky of HeyWhatsThat.com for this tip.




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