Environment

Mapping the Ebola outbreak in Google Earth

August 5, 2014

A few months ago we showed you some great maps that showed the spread of Ebola and MERS, but given the continued spread of Ebola we felt it’d be a good time to dig into them again.

George at MyReadingMapped has continued to update his Ebola map, showing the increasing spread of the virus. You can view his map in Google Earth by loading this KML file.

Additional Ebola-related maps can be found via this post on Google Maps Mania. Keir has found a few interesting maps around the web, including this one from Channel4.com and this one Al Jazeera.

If you find any other useful maps, please leave a comment and let us know.

Using Street View cars to check for gas leaks

July 30, 2014

Most of you have heard about Google’s issues with Street View card and wi-fi sniffing. Regardless your thoughts on that, you’re bound to appreciate what the cars are now able to sniff: gas leaks.

According to an article by Trevor Mogg on Digital Trends, Google is beginning to test out cars that include methane sensors to check for gas leaks.

From the article:

The initiative turned up “thousands” of leaks from utility pipes beneath the streets, providing officials with data on pollution “that used to be invisible,” EDF’s Fred Krupp wrote in a blog post Wednesday.

Fortunately these leaks don’t pose any immediate threat to safety, and the utilities will monitor and deal with the more serious ones. However, EDF noted that such gas “has a powerful effect on the global climate, packing up to 120 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide.”

Here is an early map that has been generated by this new data:

It’s a great idea, and hopefully it will be added to additional cars over time. There’s seemingly quite a few other pieces of data that could be useful to measure when you have an army of GPS-tracked cars driving around; weather data, road quality, etc. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes in the future.

Be sure to check out the full article on the Digital Trends website.

Using Google Earth to enhance urban agriculture in Rome

July 29, 2014

Urban agriculture can be a great thing, but can be difficult to effectively plan and manage. Flavio Lupia, along with other researchers from the National Institute of Agricultural Economics in Rome have been making great use of digital mapping tools to help research and plan ideal locations around the city.

You can read more about their work in this PDF document, which goes into detail about their work, such as:

The current version of the database contains more than 4,000 polygons spread over a total surface of about 35,000 hectares with a total farmed area of 400 hectares. The geodatabase was realized by interpreting the high resolution images of Google Earth for the year 2007 and 2013 allowing further analysis on the temporal evolution of the phenomenon.

Beyond that, here are some additional thoughts from Flavio:

Despite in Italy there are some private and governamental bodies producing regularly very high resolution aerophotogrammetric scenes the restriction and policy distribution of the data don’t allow researchers to perform this kind of analysis.
Although in Italy, especially during the last year, the concept of open-data is becoming more and more common this is still a theoretical idea since public administrations have releases very few geospatial data.
GE allows to perform the photointerpretation process, the digitalization and the multi-temporal analysis with an easy to use single tool.
The entire mapping project employed only human resources (researcher for the photointerpretation), no costs for tools and images acquisition and pre-processing thanks to GE.
Even if the radiometric and spatial resolution of the GE imagery are lower than those provided by the Italian public bodies, the researchers demonstrated the fitness-for-use of GE for mapping urban agriculture. The images are sufficient to discover cultivated parcels as small as 8 square meters in size and allow to photointerpreters to use all visual element to identify cropping activities (tone, color, texture, pattern, etc.).
Since 2011 GSV report the timestamp in the GE status bar. This helped researchers to have a clear idea about the acquisition time during the “virtual field check”. Nonetheless some limitations in the usability of GSV exist: 1.the temporal mismatch between GE imagery used for parcels identification (year 2013) and GSV (2011-2012). 2.the temporal variation among the single images of GSV, in fact scenes acquired in different times are woven together to form a continuous coverage along the streets (in our study area we found GSV images acquired in 2011 and 2012).

It’s an excellent use of Google Earth, and it should help result in great things for the city of Rome.

Looking at nuclear disasters in Google Earth

July 22, 2014

Sylvan Lane at Mashable recently posted an in-depth look at nuclear disasters over the years, and he made solid use of Google Earth and Google Maps to explain each event. Along with discussions of Chernobyl and Fukushima, Sylvan also took a look at Three Mile Island and Kyshtym.

You can check out the full article for yourself over on Mashable.

To highlight other nuclear facilities around the world, the folks at Google Sightseeing have put together a few “nuclear power megaposts” over the years.

The first post covered nine reactors around the world, and the second post covered seven more. As they always do, they’ve posted KML files for all of the sites that they listed in the posts (part one – part two).

Exploring earthquake fault lines in Google Earth

July 16, 2014

We’ve talked about Earthquakes quite a lot over the years, as Google Earth is a great tool for visualizing those types of events. However, we’ve not shown very much related to the actual fault lines themselves.

Ervin Malicdem at S1 Expeditions recently took a look at the West and East Valley Fault System in the southern Philippines. The fault line is growing in interest for a simple reason that Ervin explains:

The last known activity along this fault line was the year 1658 and is estimated to be active every 300 years plus or minus 100 years. As of the time of this writing, it has been 356 years ago and is well within the potential period of its movement.

He has created an excellent overlay that shows the fault line in comparison to infrastructure along the path of it.

You can read more on this blog entry or download this KML file to view it in Google Earth.

The USGS also has some solid fault line maps that you can use in Google Earth. If you visit their Quaternary Faults in Google Earth page, you’ll find a variety of KML files that you can download and explore in Google Earth.