Drought Affects One-Third of the United States

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A Third of the U.S. Faces Drought (NASA Earth Observatory)
NASA Earth Observatory

One-third of the United States is currently affected by at least moderate levels of drought, NASA Earth Observatory reports.

The map above shows conditions in the continental U.S. as of August 11, 2020, as reported by the U.S. Drought Monitor program, a partnership of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. The map depicts drought intensity in progressive shades of orange to red and is based on measurements of climate, soil, and water conditions from more than 350 federal, state, and local observers around the country. NASA provides experimental measurements and models to this drought monitoring effort.

According to the Drought Monitor, more than 93 percent of the land area in Utah, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico is in some level of drought; 69 percent of Utah is in severe drought, as is 61 percent of Colorado. More than three-fourths of Oregon, Arizona, and Wyoming are also in drought. The effects of “severe” drought include stunted and browning crops, limited pasture yields, dust storms, reduced well water levels, and an increase in the number and severity of wildfires. Most of those areas had no sign of drought in the mid-summer of 2019.

New Approaches to Ethno-Linguistic Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Back in 2017, Matthew Cooper wrote a post discussing the problems with language maps and outlined some ways to make better maps of language distributions.

One major issue with most modern maps of languages is that they often consist of just a single point for each language – this is the approach that WALS and glottolog take. This works pretty well for global-scale analyses, but simple points are quite uninformative for region scale studies of languages. Points also have a hard time spatially describing languages that have disjoint distributions, like English, or languages that overlap spatially. […]

One reason that most language geographers go for the one-point-per-language approach is that using a simple point is simple, while mapping languages across regions and areas is very difficult. An expert must decide where exactly one language ends and another begins. The problem with relying on experts, however, is that no expert has uniform experience across an entire region, and thus will have to rely on other accounts of which language is prevalent where. […]

I believe that, thanks to greater computational efficiency offered by modern computers and new datasets available from social media, it is increasingly possible to develop better maps of language distributions using geotagged text data rather than an expert’s opinion. In this blog, I’ll cover two projects I’ve done to map languages—one using data from Twitter in the Philippines, and another using computationally-intensive algorithms to classify toponyms in West Africa.

[Languagehat]

NASA Maps the Damage from the Beirut Explosion

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Earth Observatory of Singapore/ESA

NASA has released a map of the likely extent of damage from Tuesday’s explosion in Beirut.

Synthetic aperture radar data from space shows ground surface changes from before and after a major event like an earthquake. In this case, it is being used to show the devastating result of an explosion.

On the map, dark red pixels—like those present at and around the Port of Beirut—represent the most severe damage. Areas in orange are moderately damaged and areas in yellow are likely to have sustained somewhat less damage. Each colored pixel represents an area of 30 meters (33 yards).

The map is based on data from the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel program, and was analyzed by NASA’s Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis team and the Earth Observatory of Singapore.

Philadelphia Print Shop Reopening This Fall Under New Management

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Philadelphia Print Shop (not to be confused with the Denver-based Philadelphia Print Shop West), an antique prints, rare books and maps dealer that closed last December, is back in business. David Mackey has bought the business from Don Cresswell, who founded it in 1982, and is relocating it from Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill neighbourhood to nearby Wayne. A “COVID-style grand opening” is planned for October. [WMS]

Apple’s Look Around Comes to Japan

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Ata Distance reports that the Look Around of feature of Apple Maps, which is roughly analogous to Google’s Street View, is now available in the Tokyo, Kyoto-Osaka and Nagoya regions of Japan—it’s presumed that this was intended to coincide with the (now postponed) 2020 Olympics. This is the first implementation of Look Around outside the United States. [9 to 5 Mac/Engadget]

Marie Tharp at 100

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

July 30 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of pioneering ocean cartographer Marie Tharp, whose seafloor maps provided evidence of continental drift. Columbia University’s Earth Institute is marking the event with blog posts, interviews, workshops and other social media and multimedia activity. See, for example, this overview of her legacy by Marie Denoia Aronsohn and a reprint of Tharp’s own piece, “Connect the Dots: Mapping the Seafloor and Discovering the Mid-ocean Ridge.”

The anniversary probably explains why two books about Tharp, aimed at children, are coming out this year:

Ocean Speaks: How Marie Tharp Revealed the Ocean’s Biggest Secret
by Jess Keating
Tundra Books, 30 Jun 2020
Amazon (Canada, UK) | Apple Books | Bookshop


Marie’s Ocean
by Josie James
Henry Holt, 22 Sep 2020
Amazon (Canada, UK) | Apple Books

Add those to Robert Burleigh’s Solving the Puzzle Under the Sea: Marie Tharp Maps the Ocean Floor (2016), also aimed at young readers, and Hali Felt’s 2012 biography of Tharp (for adults), Soundings, which I review here.

Older posts about Marie Tharp can be found here.

Update, July 30: Suzanne O’Connell at The Conversation: “As a geoscientist, I believe Tharp should be as famous as Jane Goodall or Neil Armstrong. Here’s why.”

Garmin’s Slow Recovery from Last Week’s Ransomware Attack

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Engadget reports that Garmin’s services are starting to come back online after last week’s ransomware attack:

[I]t looks like things are slowly but surely coming back to life. Yesterday, activity-tracking app Strava confirmed that it was again able to send workout data to Garmin’s Connect service. […] But a quick look at Garmin’s system status page shows there are still plenty of issues across its platform.

Unfortunately, Garmin’s relative lack of communication around these issues means we still don’t know exactly what went wrong or when users can expect things to be back to normal. A few other key services, like registering a new device, are also back up and running, but if you’re still experiencing oddities with your Garmin devices, you’ll have to keep being patient.

Garmin’s FAQ on the outage is not particularly forthcoming.

Previously: Garmin’s Online Services Hit by Ransomware Attack.

Update, 1:48 PM: Garmin has issued a statement confirming that “it was the victim of a cyber attack that encrypted some of our systems on July 23, 2020.” There is no sign that customer data was affected, and they expect a return to normal within a few days. [Engadget]

Explore Zealandia

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
GNS Science
GNS Science

Zealandia (Te Riu-a-Māui) is the name given to a proposed, and largely submerged eighth continent, of which New Zealand (Aotearoa) is the largest above-water remnant. Explore Zealandia is geoscience company GNS Science’s web portal to their maps of this largely submerged continent, including bathymetry, tectonics, and other data; the data is also available for download. [WAML]

An Atlas of the Himalayas

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

An Atlas of the Himalayas (book cover)In An Atlas of the Himalayas by a 19th Century Tibetan Monk (Brill), Diana Lange explores the origins of six maps drawn by an anonymous Tibetan artist for a Scottish explorer in the mid-19th century, and how those maps ended up in the British Library. For more on Lange’s research into this subject, see her guest post on the British Library’s map blog.

Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

Garmin’s Online Services Hit by Ransomware Attack

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Garmin’s online services have been hit by a ransomware attack, TechCrunch reports, with outages still ongoing as of this writing. “The incident began late Wednesday and continued through the weekend, causing disruption to the company’s online services for millions of users, including Garmin Connect, which syncs user activity and data to the cloud and other devices. The attack also took down flyGarmin, its aviation navigation and route-planning service.” Email and call centres are also reportedly out of operation.

The Atlas of Surveillance

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Atlas of Surveillance (screenshot)

The Electronic Freedom Foundation’s Atlas of Surveillance is an interactive map and searchable database of surveillance technologies used by law enforcement across the United States. “We specifically focused on the most pervasive technologies, including drones, body-worn cameras, face recognition, cell-site simulators, automated license plate readers, predictive policing, camera registries, and gunshot detection. Although we have amassed more than 5,000 datapoints in 3,000 jurisdictions, our research only reveals the tip of the iceberg and underlines the need for journalists and members of the public to continue demanding transparency from criminal justice agencies.” [Maps Mania]

Creating a Fantasy Map in Photoshop

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Chris Spooner’s step-by-step tutorial on how to create a fantasy map in Photoshop offers some insights on how to create the look and feel of a digitally generated fantasy map with Photoshop. Because its method of generating land masses is more or less random (it uses the cloud rendering tool to create landforms and topography), it’s not a tool you could use to generate a map of a specific secondary world—in other words, not something that could elevate your rough sketch into something professional looking—but it looks fun to play with. [Alejandro Polanco]

Georgia’s COVID-19 Maps: Bad Faith or Bad Design?

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

In How to Lie with Maps, Mark Monmonier warns that map readers “must watch out for statistical maps carefully contrived to prove the points of self-promoting scientists, manipulating politicians, misleading advertisers, and other propagandists. Meanwhile, this is an area in which the widespread use of mapping software has made unintentional cartographic self-deception inevitable.”1

So which of these two scenarios—careful contrivance or unintentional self-deception—is at play on the Georgia Department of Public Health’s COVID-19 daily status report page?

https://twitter.com/andishehnouraee/status/1284237474831761408

Twitter user @andishehnouraee notes the difference in scale between two county-by-county COVID-19 maps of Georgia. The earlier map maxes out at 4,661 cases per 100,000, the later (and as of this writing, current) map maxes out at 5,165 cases per 100,000. As they point out, there has been a 49 percent rise in total COVID-19 cases between the two maps, but you wouldn’t know it at a glance, because the scales have changed in the meantime.

Is this, as @andishehnouraee suggests, a concerted attempt to hide the severity of the outbreak in Georgia—or, as T. J. Jankun-Kelly thinks might be the case, something that happens when you max out the old scale. In other words: bad faith or bad design? (Or both: it can be both.)

Update 19 Jul: See Twitter threads from Darrell Fuhriman and Jon Schwabish disagreeing with critiques of the Georgia Public Health maps. It’s worth clarifying that only one map is ever viewable at the website: the map’s scale has changed over time, but it’s not like they’re side-by-side except in @andishehnouraee’s tweet.

Update #2: See Jon Schwabish’s blog post critiquing the data visualization critique in more detail.