Do the natural colors that paint the landscape you call home give a hint about how you might vote in November? To some degree, yes.
The True Colors of America’s Political Spectrum Are Gray and Green
Love these 1970s satellite-derived maps that are explicitly like "Eh, who knows? Clouds and satellite bits were blocking the view."
Emphasizes the fact that these maps are representations of single moments in time.
I often gush about how fun it is to be a geographer in this day and age.
Now, an epitome.
Such a pleasure working with
@dwtkns
,
@archietse
,
@jswatz
,
@larrybuch
, Guilbert Gates and others on this.
Geography is fun!
A Portrait of Earth in 2020.
An average of tens of thousands of daytime GOES-17 images, some from every day of the year. (With apologies to December 23-31. 😬)
I run into these comparative maps all the time—showing one territory superimposed over another—so I'm gonna start dumping them all into this one thread.
1. Middle East in orange over the US, 1962.
The English Channel in 2020, as seen by
@CopernicusEU
's Sentinel-1 imaging radar. This maximum reflectivity composite shows the year in shipping lanes, offshore wind farms, &c.
I've been staring at earth imagery and election results for at least four years, trying to find some kind of key trend in the relationship between the two. But for the most part, what I saw was either obvious or uncompelling (no offense, former me).
It doesn't look like much to us nowadays, but this map and caption from a 1959 Waldo Tobler Geographical Review paper is a bit mind-bending.
"Map of the United States drawn directly by machine from a deck of 343 punched cards. Plotting time, approximately 15 minutes."
Every now and again I come across an old book that just 🤯. Here's the latest: "A Hand-Book for Mapping, Engineering, and Architectural Drawing....", 1846.
Method for delineating mountains:
And of course we wanted to see what the colors actually represented, so we ran the same analysis using land cover data. This was a tad nerve-racking to be honest. If the trends in this analysis were flat, our hypothesis about the colors would have been thrown out.
🚨BIG (tiny!) MAP ALERT🚨
If you get your hands on today's print edition of
@nytimes
, you'll be treated to a giant two-page spread of analysis on how the vote shifted in 2020 featuring a 23.76″ wide map.
On A1, you'll be treated to a 1.8″ wide lil cutie version of the same.
Extra! Extra! Read all about it!
The Drowning Coast, a special section featuring this wraparound cover emblazoned with a giant radar satellite image.
Our collaboration with
@NOLAnews
at your newsstand this Sunday!
How much has your neighborhood physically changed over the last decade? If you live in an American exurb, chances are the answer is "LOADS."
For
@qdbui
&
@emilymbadger
's latest,
@k3blu3
& I lent a hand.
A Decade of Urban Transformation, Seen From Above
In August,
@tierneyl
shot me a note asking what's with fall colors in satellite imagery. I wasn't sure, but Krishna Karra & I loved the question—so we got to work.
Now, we're thrilled to have helped with this truly beautiful piece by Lauren and
@joemfox
!
Many fire maps making the rounds use default symbols regardless of map scale.
Here are the same points mapped in two ways:
1. Default symbol
2. At native scale
The default dot here is a full 200x larger than a dot at the resolution of the observation.
FIRE!
Sentinel-2 snapped a stunning image of Chicago and Lake Michigan today. That long crack in the ice (4th image) starts off of Montrose Beach and stretches to just north of Indiana Dunes National Park is nearly 40 miles long. 👏
@CopernicusEU
👏
I'm packing up my pencils, protractor and love of geographic storytelling for Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I'll be heading up creative efforts at
@DescartesLabs
.
It's a pretty cool time to be a geographer and I couldn't be more excited!
But then I started workin with the inimitable
@k3blu3
& we could think realistically about cranking through proverbial piles of data.
Last winter, I started playing around with this idea of color swatches acting as a sort of landscape fingerprint.
For our final piece together,
@k3blu3
and I used ALL THE INK. Stunning layout by
@standardregular
and Guilbert Gates. Web version here: Behind the scenes here:
Here's a maximum wind speed composite image of the 2020 hurricane season around the contiguous United States. It shows the US as if everywhere experienced its highest winds of the season all at once. (Created using Real-Time Mesoscale Analysis data from
@NWS
).
Krishna & I don't work together any more. 😭😭😭 I've happily returned to
@nytimes
& he's moved on to
@wattTime
.
But one thing I LOVED about working with Krishna is that when we believed in something we always kept going.
We didn't stop with a US gradient. We did states too!
My colleague, Krishna Karra, thought it'd be fun to map all of the solar, wind and oil & gas infrastructure in Texas using machine learning. I think he was right.
When Krishna & I were convinced there might be trends across the political spectrum, he indexed 1-meter resolution imagery for the entire contiguous US and... how long did it take to run this on the
@DescartesLabs
platform, Krishna? 15 or 30 minutes? 👀
Did y'all know that you can download Adobe production files for beautiful
@NatlParkService
maps?! (I certainly did not). Just pick a state, then a park, here () and you can see how those legendary map styles are made. Yay, NPS!
If Kilauea's lava flow from Wednesday originated at Bryant Park in New York (which it doesn't and never will), it would flow into the East River at the Manhattan Bridge.