Hurricane Sandy Flood Damage Maps from New York Times

I've been admiring the great work that the New York Times has been doing by not only telling about but showing through map visualizations the extent of damage brought on by Hurricane Sandy. The maps above and below are from Surveying the Destruction Caused by Hurricane Sandy.

When you click on a rectangle on the Flooding in NYC map, you'll get something like above from Brighton Beach NY which shows building footprints colored with the height of the water surge and photos of damages. These maps went live in mid- ot late-November and didn't include damage from New Jersey.

But now you can click on Regional Damage and you have the map above which gives some insight into the extent of damage across NJ and NY. And then below is a zoomed-in look at Long Branch/Monmouth Beach, NJ, showing destroyed and damaged structures and photos of the area.

As always, impressive work and effort by the cartographers of the Times. Here is the most recent article On Ravaged Coastline, It's Rebuild Deliberately vs. Rebuild Now. There was a slick graphic that accompanied the paper article but it seems to not yet be uploaded on to the Times online website.

 

Using Maps to Teach U.S History - Manifest Destiny

Check out Manifest Destiny. This is a great way to visualize and teach about the expansion of the United States through time. Plus the site is very slick and easy to use.

From the web site: Manifest Destiny tells the story of the United States in 141 maps from the Declaration of Independence to the present.

Hover over the Legend and the legend shows up (see above).

Hover over a thumbnail of a map and see the date (below).

Click on a map and get more information. You can also highlight the changes on the map (below)

Great work by data visualization consultant, Michael Porath. Thank you, Aprecido Leite, for the tweet.

Teaching About Meteors and Crater Impacts

Here's a nice web site for showing students the size and density of a meteor and the impact that piece of rock or ice might make on the ground (or in water). It's called Impact Calculator.

You can put in various parameters for the piece of "rock": diameter, trajectory angle, velocity, density of the rock material, density of the landing site, and distance from the impact.

Click Submit and you get the impact values. If you select a place around the world from the dropdown menu and then click on the map, you can see the size of the hypothetical crater. This is under the Crater Size tab.

Look at what you get under the Crater Depth tab. In the interest of this summer's revolving around all things UK, I chose Big Ben as a scale bar for this hypothetical imapct structure.

Saw this on a tweet by eSpatial.

New Spreadsheet Mapper 3

There's a new version of Spreadsheet Mapper out. I used version 2 in the past and thought it was terrific. I was under the impression that Google Fusion Tables would replace Spreadsheet Mapper but I guess I was mistaken.

If you have a spreadsheet with up to 1000 places marked by longitude and latitude, and you need to map them as nice-looking, template-driven placemarks, give Spreadsheet Mapper 3 a try.

Features:

• More placemarks: Support for 1,000 placemarks and ability to add more as needed
• Flexible balloon design: Take advantage of even more balloon design templates and simplified starter templates
• Simplified publication: Just click “Publish to the web” to share your map (no more fussing with URLs)
• New customization options: Advanced users can change the default view and network link details

Food Deserts - It's All In the Mapping

Today's New York Times has a front page article on food deserts in the US by Gina Kolata (Studies Question the Pairing of Food Deserts and Obesity). Food deserts are places that are believed to be lacking in healthy and affordable food.  It's long been taken on faith (or personal observation) that it's more unhealthy to live in the inner city or in a rural area than in the suburbs. This article discusses two new reports that show that the food desert concept is not entirely accurate and that some locations may be more akin to 'food swamps.' I think its all in how you use your GIS, the data you enter (by US Census tracts, zip codes areas, or addresses by points), and what you want to find. An example of how to lie with maps?! Perhaps. 

In the article there is a link to the US Department of Agriculture Food Desert Locator that should be checked out. Apparently, I live on the edge of a desert. I kind of don't agree. The downtown shaded tract in the screen capture (along the Hudson River) might be more accurate but not the one near the red dot. Interesting how the three colleges in my neighborhood are not within a 'food desert' tract. Play with the site and see for yourself. Enter an address and take a look.

From the Food Desert Locator About page:

Part of the First Lady's Let's Move! initiative, the proposed Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) will expand the availability of nutritious food to food deserts—low-income communities without ready access to healthy and affordable food—by developing and equipping grocery stores, small retailers, corner stores, and farmers markets with fresh and healthy food. The HFFI is a partnership between the Treasury Department, Health and Human Services, and the Agriculture Department (USDA). 

Wind As A Visualization

A wind map of the lower 48 U.S. states. The first map is zoomed in on the northeast right now and the second are screen shots of past days/times.  The lines indicate wind speed, as "delicate traceries." These lovely visualizations look like salt marsh grasses blowing in the breeze.  If it doesn't work for you, try Chrome.

From the site: "An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us—energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future. 

This map shows you the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the US right now." 

Thanks @dianamaps! She posted about this.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Flood Map: Is Your House On High (Enough) Ground?

This Flood Map (in Beta) map helps to visualize where the flood-prone areas are in the event of sea level rise. I am not sure of the accuracy of the map and data, but it is pretty fun to play with. Here is a right-click on Central Park and then putting in a sea-level rise of 20 meters.  One should be okay there but the rest of Manhattan and the five boroughs look pretty dodgy. Put in your home address and rise the sea level then prepare to be shocked.

Heard about this from a Buzz from @DonMeltz.

Hurricane Tracking Map via New York Times

The awesome cartographers at the New York Times strike again, this time giving us a beautiful and interactive web map showing the track, wind speed and the projected track of Hurricane Irene, which is hitting the east coast of the U.S. right now. You can go back and forth between a simple Google Maps basemap or use an aerial photo from today (Aug 26) or August 24. Check the wind speed graph too.

Thanks, @elguary, for the tweet.

See the full gallery on Posterous

 

FedEx and Cartograms

I'm not really sure why FedEx - delivers to a changing world - got into the map visualizations game, but take a look at some of the many cartograms of the world. Attached here are recycled paper use by country (largest is China), beer imports (the U.S. leads), and population density (largest Singapore). Click on See Other World Topics and check out the other maps that FedEx has put together. Some look goofy but it's still kind of fun to look at these maps.

Thanks to my friend geoparadigm for tweeting this.

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Restored Map From 1770

Someone at the New York Times loves maps and stories about maps. Yesterday we got a glimpse of a lovingly restored map of the lower New York Harbor drawn in 1770 by cartographer Bernard Ratzer. Here is the Times story but you should really check out the interactive digital image of the map in it's "old" state and then again in the newly rehabilitated state (both shown here from the same location on either map). Check out the west bank of the Hudson River, in New Jersey. All of that swamp land has been filled in to make Hoboken and Jersey City and Ellis Island was called Bucking Island.

They don't make maps like that anymore.

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Census Data Show Immigrants Moving to the Suburbs

The New York Times had more maps on their cover today. This time they are mapping new residents to the U.S.  Oddly enough, immigrants (mapped from 2005 to 2009) seem to be moving to the suburbs rather then the cities or rural areas.

The map above shows the area where I live (Poughkeepsie NY). This is a dot density map by census tract showing a dot for each 50 persons by variable. As you move into the interactive map, the dot density numeration changes. Pretty nice.

Here is the link to the Time's interactive map. It's powered by Google Maps and uses socialexplorer.com.

If you click on More Maps you'll get to choose other variables (by tract for the U.S.) such as Race and Ethnicity, Income, Housing and Families, and Education.

Make Your Own (Different-looking) Web Maps

Sometimes you want a web map that looks just a bit different than the usual fare. Here is Polymaps:

Polymaps provides speedy display of multi-zoom datasets over maps, and supports a variety of visual presentations for tiled vector data, in addition to the usual cartography from OpenStreetMap, CloudMade, Bing, and other providers of image-based web maps.

Because Polymaps can load data at a full range of scales, it’s ideal for showing information from country level on down to states, cities, neighborhoods, and individual streets. Because Polymaps uses SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) to display information, you can use familiar, comfortable CSS rules to define the design of your data. And because Polymaps uses the well known spherical mercator tile format for its imagery and its data, publishing information is a snap.

Check them out. Polymaps provide the code for different and slick-looking maps.

I saw this on a tweet by Barbara Hui.

Worldwide Dengue Map

From the Google.org Blog, I heard about the Dengue Map. It's a Google Maps-based health map showing the locations around the world where there have been incidences of dengue. The maps was created by HealthMap and is a result of a Google.org grant. Dengue is on my mind because I'm living in Barbados where there is a worry about dengue, mosquitoes are everywhere, and according to this map Barbados is an area of ongoing transmission risk. I've heard that there's one child who got dengue, though I don't see that listed here as yet.  Wear your bug spray!

Migration Maps

Demonstrating with maps that the U.S. is a mobile country with mobile citizens, check out some screen captures of maps at Migration Maps: The Real Social Networks. Go to the interactive web site and map for yourself at Forbes. Click on a county and see black lines (inward migration) or red lines (those people fleeing the county). The map above shows migration patterns for Las Vegas (Clark Co.) Nevada with lot's of people moving there from the northeast and California and lots more moving out and going to the northwest and points south. The data are from the IRS from 2008. Isn't anyone moving OUT of the U.S.?

I heard about these interesting maps from GISeducation.

Mapping the #hackacad Contributors

I saw a tweet about a graph of Hacking the Academy contributors compiled by Adam Crymble. It was an interesting look at who submitted entries or papers or posts for the crowd-sourced book-in-a-week project. Hacking the Academy is a project out of the Center for History and New Media located at George Mason University. (tag: #hackacad) Tom Scheinfeld and Dan Cohen are heading it up. The graph that Adam assembled was heavily skewed towards GMU. I wanted to see if there was more geographic diversity amongst the contributors.

I asked Adam if he would share his data and, like any good open-source scholar, he did. I took his spreadsheet, added some more details to Adam's truly amazing detective work, found some addresses, added group blog entries and Profhacker posts by location of the writer. Then I used Batchgeocode to get latitude and longitude for each contributor which allowed me to create a map (in ArcGIS 9.2) showing where the contributions came from.

The map above shows small black dots for each essay or article. Most submissions are from North America and the northeast is heavily favored. With this approach you cannot tell that there are, for instance, 40 essays from GMU or that Canberra, Australia, has six entries since all of the points for one location align on top of each other. So I did a density map for the points.

Using a cluster analysis (shown above) on the points with density type: kernel; output cell size: 0.5; and search radius: 25 sq map units, I still get a similar view of the contributions, with some hint of action in the UK area.

I put together a Google Earth KMZ file for these data. Find it here (launches Google Earth).

What I want to do is make a map mashup so that all the points show up at once on a world map. I couldn't get it to work. If anyone knows how to add over 300 points (by latitude and longitude) to a web map, please help a mapper out!

I could make a mashup using BatchGeocode but 1) I couldn't get all the 314 points onto one single map, and 2) multiple entries for a single location show up as ONE entry. Here they are:

Link to larger map shown below (US Contributors)

Link to the larger map shown below (Non-US Contributors)

 

Thanks Adam! This was fun.

U.K. Election Results Shown in MapTube

I saw some great choropleth maps of the U.K. election results shown using MapTube from a blog post at the CASA blog. What is shown above are the results for the Liberal Democrat vote and the Conservative vote, with a degree of transparency for each. Use the small slider bar under the map icon to the right to increase or decrease the transparency. You can drag and drop the maps, too. It's a very slick interface.

I haven't used MapTube at all but it is one of the better web map interfaces. You can see what maps they already have, download as a KML, or upload your own maps using GMapCreator software. All maps come with legends, some legends are better than others. CASA is the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis out of the University College London.

More Horrific Graphics on the BP Oil Catastrophe: From the New York Times

The incredible graphics depicting the worst oil drilling catastrophe in history keep coming. The New York Times has this amazing graphic on line. Use the Play button at the top to see how the oil is getting dispersed through time. They will probably continue to update the map. Notice there's habitat information on the map, and on the right side of the graphic, estimates of the volume as compared to our most recent "worst oil spill ever," the Exxon-Valdez.  Though the Times calls this an "oil spill," it is hardly a spill or a leak. Those words, to me, imply a minor mistake, an unfortunate mishap. This is so beyond "ooops, we're really sorry."

More on LiDAR: Uncovering Earth Without a Backhoe

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Two days in a row, the New York Times has run stories related to geospatial technologies, in particular LiDAR. The laser mapping technology must be hot or something. Two archaeologists who have worked in Belize for years mapping and excavating Maya ruins sites, stumbled upon a non-invasive technology to cut through forest and discover how the ancient civilization in Belize lived, built their cities, grew crops, and probably how they used water. Not only does the use of LiDAR save loads of time but it means ground doesn't have to be broken to get a picture of the past society. Be sure to check out the imagery of the mapping.

When I was in Belize for the Natural Resources Management class in March, we went to a Maya site, Xunantunich. After seeing the structural shape and the surrounding terrain (shown in the photo above and the video), and the fact that not all buildings were excavated, when traveling around Belize on the rest of the trip, these pyramid-shaped structures were clearly visible in many places. They were just not uncovered. With this remote sensing, they don't really need to be, it seems.

LiDAR Imagery for NYC

In an effort to be prepared for the affects of climate change, New York City is getting a LIDAR scan. LiDAR is Light Detection and Ranging technology. This will help with figuring out the best locations for solar panels and to analyze for impending sea-level rise, among other concerns. The article in yesterday's New York Times make it sound like this is the first of its kind in the Big Apple. However, after September 11 LIDAR was collected by NOAA and used for cleanup efforts. Couldn't that data still be used?

I can think of a few small island nations here in the Caribbean who could use some LiDAR data. These low-lying coastal countries are extremely vulnerable to climate changes and fluctuations.

Thanks for the tweet, NYS_GISA.

Putting the Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico Into Geographic Perspective

If you want further evidence of just how big the oil catastrophe is in the Gulf of Mexico (I refuse to call it a "spill"), take a look at this amazing visualization using a Google Earth API created by Paul Radacher called "How big is the Deepwater Horizon oil spill?"  Click on each of the cities to get a perspective of the area involved. Imagine oil covering all of the Washington DC, flowing south into the Potomac and spreading all the way into Delaware. Incomprehensible! Type in your town, and see what you see. The spill covers all of my home county in New York and each of the adjacent counties.

Thanks for the tweet, ogleearth.