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.
Category: Weather and Climate
Mapping Drought in Europe
The European Drought Observatory maps drought the way meteorologists map extreme weather: it maps watches, warnings and alerts based on a lack of rainfall, a lack of soil moisture, and stress to vegetation following a lack of moisture, respectively. In addition to the online map viewer, there is a comparison tool and a way to generate your own maps from the data, among other tools. As of early August, the Observatory says, 47 percent of EU territory is facing warning conditions, 17 percent in alert conditions. It’s been a bad summer. [Maps Mania]
The Climate Shift Index
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
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
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.
Saharan Dust in Western Europe
A dust plume from the Sahara, driven by an atmospheric river, blew across western Europe this week, and friends from Spain to Germany experienced it. NASA Earth Observatory has satellite imagery of the plume, plus maps (above) showing “a model of the dust plumes blowing across North Africa and into Europe on March 14 and 15. The model was generated by the Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5), a global atmospheric model that uses mathematical equations to represent physical processes. Measurements of physical properties like temperature, moisture, and wind speeds and directions are routinely folded into the model to keep the simulation as close to observed reality as possible.”
‘The People Who Draw Rocks’
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]
Alaskan Ice in Retreat
This NASA Earth Observatory video looks at the retreat of Alaska’s Columbia Glacier since 1986. Transcript here.
Mapping Methane Emissions
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.)
Google Rerouted Traffic Up Poorly Maintained Mountain Roads During a Blizzard
Last week, when a snowstorm closed Interstate 80 east of Sacramento, Google Maps started redirecting traffic up poorly maintained mountain roads, which is about as good an idea during a blizzard as it sounds.
.@googlemaps This is an abject failure. You are sending people up a poorly maintained forest road to their death in a severe blizzard. Hire people who can address winter storms in your code (or maybe get some of your engineers who are stuck in Tahoe right now on it). pic.twitter.com/IzagAXzBtA
— Dr. Crystal A. Kolden 🔥 (@pyrogeog) December 28, 2021
Other dispatches from Twitter allege that the service—particularly its mobile app—directed people to closed-off highways, mountain passes and lakeside roads to get around. This is in direct contrast to Caltrans’ messaging to avoid workarounds. Caltrans District 3 spokesperson Steve Nelson told SFGATE on Monday that they were seeing drivers trying to skirt highway closures with side streets. “They’ll take side roads and try and sneak past the closures, and that never ends well,” he said.
Google engineer Sören Meyer-Eppler responded on Twitter to spell out some of the technical and logistical problems involved in rerouting traffic during bad weather: the difficulty in finding timely data (and in such cases data need to be really timely) and the risk of false positives. More at Jalopnik.
First Images from Landsat 9 Released
The latest of the Landsat satellites, Landsat 9, launched on September 27. Similar to Landsat 8 with slight equipment upgrades, it will replace Landsat 7 when it is fully operational next year. Right now it’s going through its 100-day check-out, after which NASA will hand it over to the USGS. As part of that check-out, its first images were recently released. [NASA Earth Observatory]
Patterson’s Malaspina Glacier Panorama
Tom Patterson’s latest is a panorama of Alaska’s Malaspina Glacier, with the St. Elias Mountains in the background. “I rendered this panorama to showcase a wild landscape in its entirety where human development is minimal. The sprawling Malaspina Glacier with its concentric rings of ice, rubble, and meltwater is front and center. I started this project in 2017 and then put it aside for four years. However, accelerating climate change brought newfound urgency to my mapping. I wanted to map this beautiful glacier while it still exists.”
Previously: Tom Patterson’s Map of Prince William Sound.
Mapping NOAA’s New Climate Normals
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 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 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
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
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]