On Tornadoes and Climate The Joplin twister, which a GOES satellite observed on May 23, has promoted many people to wonder if climate change has fueled the recent spree of storms. The answer: possibly La Nina (Reuters), no (Agence France-Presse), and not likely (Climate Central). Should We Use Levees to Build in Floodplains? The swollen Mississippi raises […]
Welcome to Earth Matters, the news and notes blog of Earth Observatory. And welcome to an ongoing conversation about our amazing planet. Earth Matters will be composed by the science writers, data visualizers, and web developers of Earth Observatory and of NASA’s Earth Science News Team. We are former journalists and scientists, communications majors and […]
In response to Map of the Ancient Mississippi a few of you left comments to the effect of “no one should live in floodplains.” It’s an appealing notion, but I think it’s unrealistic. Anne Jefferson of Highly Allochthonous published an epic post yesterday outlining the benefits and risks of building in a flood plain, and […]
Here’s a sneak peek at the site-wide redesign we’ll be launching next week. Let us know what you think (not that we can change anything at this point, but we’ll keep any critiques in mind for version 3.1). [Design primarily by Cuban Council, implementation by Paul Przyborski & Kevin Ward.]
Sticking to the flood theme, here’s a recent map from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers showing the predicted travel time for water in the Morganza Floodway. It’s a reasonably good map, with one big flaw: the colors are more appropriate for categorical data (such as a geological map of different rock types) rather than […]
While poking around looking for imagery of the 1973 flooding on the Mississippi, I discovered some fascinating, very high resolution aerial photography. Images of Morgan City—a community near the mouth of the Atchafalaya River that was damaged by flooding in 1973, and will likely be hit by rising water in the next few weeks. Both […]
Historic flooding along the Mississippi River gives me an excuse to show another of my favorite maps, from Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River. Each color represents an old channel, dating back 1,000 years or so. Those that correspond to historical records are dated, while older channels are ordered according […]
Since I was (slightly) critical of the New York Times graphics department yesterday, I’ll show a Times map that is one of my favorite visualizations today: a map of shaking intensity and slip during the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Aside from being elegant, it’s data-rich without being cluttered, and multivariate. It shows shaking intensity (in […]
Last week, Jessica Ball of the American Geophysical Union’s Magma Cum Laude blog pointed out this map of natural hazards in the U.S., published by the New York Times: The map has many of the design virtues common in graphics from the Times (clean, focused on the data, clearly labeled, small multiples), but when I […]
I recently had the opportunity to attend & give a presentation at the 2011 International Symposium on Remote Sensing of the Environment in lovely Sydney, Australia. (OK, not so recently—the conference ended on the April 15th. I blame jetlag.) Just over 60 people turned up for the talk, which was mostly about our visualization of […]
