Exploring the world of free tools for GIS, GPS, Google Earth, neogeography, and more.
Portland State University’s Glaciers Online site has maps, photos and data for glaciers of the American West. Contents include:
Other mapping sites seem to be doing an Earth Day related post, so I’ll move this one up a bit. Energy production from the heat of the earth (geothermal energy) generates no carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming, and could produce as much as 100,000 megawatts in the US alone by the year 2050. Here are some websites with geographic geothermal data, both maps and downloadable data.
A while back, I posted on an NOAA website that mapped carbon dioxide concentrations and emissions globally and locally. The Green Car Congress website has posted about a new resource that has maps of both emissions and sequestration, real and potential, for the US and Canada.
One site linked to has PDFs of the printable version of the Carbon Sequestration Atlas of the United States and Canada. The NatCarb site links to maps, static and interactive, showing both the sources and potential sinks/sequestration sites for carbon dioxide.
The United Nations Food And Agriculture Organization (FAO) maintains the FAO GeoNetwork, a data portal for worldwide digital geographic information from the FAO, other UN agencies, NGOs and other organizations. Despite the “Food And Agriculture” in the name, there’s far more than just agricultural-related data here.
The FAO Portal Page has a web search interface for tracking down data. Not all the data is available in downloadable digital format – for much of it, only the metadata is available. If you’re only interested in digital data, just check “Digital” next to “Map type” box. Search results can be random in nature, and sometimes data listed as being available in downloadable format isn’t. But you never know what useful stuff might pop up. For example, here’s a map of the southern tip of Africa, plotted from 1:125,00 scale coastline vector data for Africa and Arabia derived from SRTM data:
Recent coastline data with that kind of resolution isn’t always easy to find.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed that lists new datasets as they’re added to the portal. There’s also an interactive online mapping system for creating your own maps, and an extensive list of WMS servers with a wide variety of information you can add to WMS-compatible programs like MapWindow and Google Earth. You may not always find exactly what you need, but it’s definitely worth a look.
I love rocks. I love dirt. And I love the maps that show them. A good geology map is visually like a weird hybrid between a Peter Max poster and Jackson Pollock drip painting, but also tells a story spanning several billion years of Earth’s history. I’ve found a few websites where you can find and download geology maps in a variety of formats.
Continue reading ‘Rocks And Dirt – Geology And Soil Maps Of The US And World’