Tag: climate change

Google, EDF Partner to Build Map of Global Methane Emissions

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Methane is a greenhouse gas, more powerful than CO2 but shorter-lived. Google is partnering with the Environmental Defense Fund to map global methane emissions, much of which result from leaks from fossil fuel infrastructure and are undercounted. The EDF’s MethaneSAT satellite (itself a partnership between the EDF and New Zealand’s space agency) launches next month: it’ll measure methane emissions at high resolution. Google’s bringing to the party algorithms and AI, the latter to build a global map of oil and gas infrastructure.

Once we have this complete infrastructure map, we can overlay the MethaneSAT data that shows where methane is coming from. When the two maps are lined up, we can see how emissions correspond to specific infrastructure and obtain a far better understanding of the types of sources that generally contribute most to methane leaks. This information is incredibly valuable to anticipate and mitigate emissions in oil and gas infrastructure that is generally most susceptible to leaks.

More at The Verge.

Previously: Mapping Methane Emissions.

The Mediterranean’s Summer Heat Wave

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Europe’s summer heat wave wasn’t just felt on land; the Mediterranean Sea saw surface temperatures as much as 5°C above the average. The ESA’s animated map, above, shows the difference between sea surface temperatures from March to August 2022 and the 1985-2005 average for those months. The redder, the hotter than average. [ESA]

Climate Change Could Affect Maritime Boundaries

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Sea level rise and coral reef destruction could have an impact on international boundaries, according to a study by University of Sydney researchers published in Environmental Research Letters. Coral reefs form the basis for a number of claims on maritime zones, which could suddenly be in doubt if reef destruction or changes to a reef’s low-water line erase that basis. Press release.

The Climate Shift Index

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Climate Shift Index map for low temperatures on 14 June 2022

Bloomberg has the story on the Climate Shift Index, which maps the impact of climate change on daily temperatures in the U.S. It doesn’t quite work the way you’d expect at first glance: the index, ranging from -5 to +5, measures the calculated impact of climate change on the current temperatures. This video explains how it works, as does the FAQ.

Mapping Where the Earth Will Become Uninhabitable

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Screenshot of an interactive globe showing where climate change will make the Earth uninhabitable, from the Berliner Morgenpost.
Berliner Morgenpost (screenshot)

An interactive globe from the Berliner Morgenpost shows where the Earth is predicted to become uninhabitable by 2100, based on climate models that assume global warming of 2.5-3°C by that date. The globe starts with a vertical map of population, then uses heat maps to indicate where the impacts of heat, drought, sea level rise and increased tropical cyclones will be felt. The key point of this visualization is the impact on population: how many, not just where. In German and English. [Maps Mania]

Indigenous Content Added to Climate Atlas of Canada

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

CBC News reports on the launch of an Indigenous Knowledges component to the Climate Atlas of Canada:

Until now, the interactive atlas did not show climate change projections for Indigenous communities. Only Canadian urban centres were included.

The newly-launched feature provides information about the impacts of climate change on 634 First Nations communities and 53 Inuit communities, while also profiling projects surrounding climate change adaptation and mitigation across the Métis homeland.

The Climate Atlas has a video demo of its Indigenous content. The Atlas’s online map, with Indigenous layers, is here.

‘The People Who Draw Rocks’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Melting glaciers are keeping a special team of cartographers at Swisstopo, Switzerland’s national mapping agency, busy: they’re the ones charged with making changes to the Swiss alps on Swisstopo’s maps. The New York Times reports:

“The glaciers are melting, and I have more work to do,” as Adrian Dähler, part of that special group, put it.

Dähler is one of only three cartographers at the agency—the Federal Office of Topography, or Swisstopo—allowed to tinker with the Swiss Alps, the centerpiece of the country’s map. Known around the office as “felsiers,” a Swiss-German nickname that loosely translates as “the people who draw rocks,” Dähler, along with Jürg Gilgen and Markus Heger, are experts in shaded relief, a technique for illustrating a mountain (and any of its glaciers) so that it appears three-dimensional. Their skills and creativity also help them capture consequences of the thawing permafrost, like landslides, shifting crevasses and new lakes.

The article is a fascinating look at an extraordinarily exacting aspect of cartography. [WMS]

Mapping Methane Emissions

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
World map of methane emissions from fossil fuel exploitation
Methane emissions from oil, gas, and coal exploitation in the Global Fuel Exploitation Inventory (GFEI) version 1 in 2016 (Mg/y/km2)

NASA Earth Observatory:

Funded by NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System, scientists recently built a new series of maps detailing the geography of methane emissions from fossil fuel production. Using publicly available data reported in 2016, the research team plotted fuel exploitation emissions—or “fugitive emissions” as the UNFCCC calls them—that arise before the fuels are ever consumed. The maps delineate where these emissions occur based on the locations of coal mines, oil and gas wells, pipelines, refineries, and fuel storage and transportation infrastructure. The maps were recently published at NASA’s Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC). (Note that 2016 was the most recent year with complete UN emissions data available at the time of this study.)

Mapping Irrecoverable Carbon

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
From Noon, Goldstein, Ledezma et al., “Mapping the irrecoverable carbon in Earth’s ecosystems,” Nat Sustain (2021). Creative Commons licence.

A new study published in Nature Sustainability maps the Earth’s reserves of what is called “irrecoverable carbon”—that is to say, those stores of carbon in nature that, if released into the atmosphere, would not be able to be restored in the timeframe required to deal with climate change. These stores include wetlands and old-growth forests, which take longer to replenish.

Irrecoverable carbon represents 20% of the total manageable ecosystem carbon. Globally, 79.0 Gt (57%) of irrecoverable carbon is found in biomass while 60.0 Gt (43%) is in soils. […] The largest and highest-density irrecoverable carbon reserves are in the tropical forests and peatlands of the Amazon (31.5 Gt), the Congo Basin (8.2 Gt) and Insular Southeast Asia (13.1 Gt); the temperate rainforest of northwestern North America (5.0 Gt); the boreal peatlands and associated forests of eastern Canada and western Siberia (12.4 Gt); and mangroves and tidal wetlands globally (4.8 Gt).

The study argues that such reserves should be considered unexploitable; about 48 percent of it is already within protected or indigenous lands. About half the irrecoverable carbon sits on 3.3 percent of the world’s land area. [ScienceNews, GIS Lounge]

Mapping NOAA’s New Climate Normals

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

This month NOAA updated the official U.S climate normals. You know how in a weather forecast a meteorologist talks about normal temperatures or normal amounts of rain? The climate normals define what normal is: they take into account weather over the past 30 years, and are updated every 10 years. As you might expect, the normals do reveal the extent of climate change.

NOAA

NOAA compares the new 1991-2020 normals period with the one that came before (1981-2010): “Most of the U.S. was warmer, and the eastern two-thirds of the contiguous U.S. was wetter, from 1991–2020 than the previous normals period, 1981–2010. The Southwest was considerably drier on an annual basis, while the central northern U.S. has cooled somewhat.” (Bear in mind that there’s a 20-year overlap between the two normals.)

The New York Times (screenshot)

The New York Times has created a series of animated maps showing how 30-year normals compare with 20th-century averages for temperature and precipitation. “The maps showing the new temperature normals every 10 years, compared with the 20th century average, get increasingly redder.”

The data is available from NOAA’s website.

Climate from Space

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
ESA

The European Space Agency’s new Climate from Space website presents satellite data on a host of different climate indicators, from aerosols to CO2, from land cover to sea ice, via 3D virtual globes. From the announcement:

The new, easy-to-use site provides access to the same satellite observations used by scientists to understand climate change and support international organisations such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to drive action.

There is a suite of 21 climate data records to explore, which are generated by ESA’s Climate Change Initiative. The suite includes sea level, sea surface temperature, soil moisture, snow depth and the greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, as well as new visualisations for the latest climate variables records such as permafrost and lakes.

Mapping Climate Change’s Impact on California’s Fire Seasons

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
ProPublica (screenshot)

ProPublica maps the change in California’s fire seasons. “As California continues battling its worst wildfire season on record, new research shows that fall fire weather days—days with high temperatures, low humidity and high wind speeds—will double in parts of the state by the end of the century and will increase 40% by 2065. […] In the north, a summer fire season has been driven by high temperatures and low humidity. In Southern California, fall fire season is driven by east winds. With climate change, though, both the summer and fall fire seasons have grown longer, and are melting into each other, overlapping in time and space.” [Joshua Stevens]

Mapping Climate Risk in the United States

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
The New York Times (screenshot)

Climate change isn’t just one thing: rising temperatures, or sea level rise. It’s also changes to rainfall, increased risk of wildfires, more powerful hurricanes. The extent to which any of these are threats depends on where you live: North Dakota doesn’t have much to worry about rising sea levels, but it should think about drought. That’s what this interactive map from the New York Times attempts to measure: the climate risks to the United States on a county-by-county basis.

Previously: How Climate Change Will Transform the United States.