Welcome to Spatial Awareness, a regular editorial focused on the maps and the spatial community. Each
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| July 14 · Issue #5 · View online |
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Welcome to Spatial Awareness, a regular editorial focused on the maps and the spatial community. Each issue I’ll highlight the most interesting and inspiring things that I’ve found — cool demos, new tools, tutorials, beautiful maps, interviews, behind-the-scenes and more.
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The past week has been a busy one, full to the brim with spatial goodies. Throughout the week we had Esri UC going on, which resulted in all sorts of announcements and cool maps. Also, the Spatial Awareness community has been in overdrive lately, suggesting loads of interesting content for future issues. Please keep it coming! And did you notice my unforgivable spelling mistake in the previous, “forth” issue? It turns out my brain decided that was entirely the right word to use and I’m still a little embarrassed about the whole thing. Oh well, I’m hoping I can claim back at least some credibility in this firth issue. 🤞 So as always, sit back and join me on this periodic journey through the world of maps. And remember, you can unsubscribe at any point if you’re not finding this useful. One last thing — you can reply directly to me via this email if you have content suggestions, questions, or just want to say hi. Lots of you have done this so far. Don’t be shy! 👋
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Trails of Wind
Trails of Wind maps airport runways from around the world, colour-coding them by orientation. The result is a beautiful map that highlights the intricate patterns created by the runways as each is orientated to maximise the use of prevailing winds.
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MapSCII: The whole world in your console
Have you ever wanted an interactive map in your command-line interface? Probably not. Even so, MapSCII is quirky, retro and as interesting for the technology as it is for its novelty (it uses vector tiles!).
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Rock Climbing Map: Vancouver, British Columbia
This map by Sarah Bell is another great example of a monochrome map. In it she uses isochrones to show all the climbing areas within 3 hours of Vancouver. Nice attention to detail! 👌 |
The North Sea
Owen Powell has put together a beautiful shaded relief map of the North Sea using Blender and elevation data from EMODnet. I love the colour scheme! 🎨
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Have you made an interesting map recently? I’d like to highlight more maps from the subscriber community. Don’t be shy! Either reply to this email or contact me on Twitter. |
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Before & after of latest NOAA weather model update
Cameron Beccario (of earth.nullschool.net fame) recently shared an example of how detailed the new NOAA weather forecasting model is compared to the old version. In short, it’s much more detailed!
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Archive of National Geographic's vintage maps
National Geographic have digitally compiled 6,000+ maps from their vintage collection. Some of these maps will be slowly released over the coming weeks as they work their way through the huge collection. Aside: I debated adding this one to the newsletter as the maps aren’t being fully released but I thought it was still interesting enough to include.
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Compression benchmarks for 1m elevation data stored as GeoTIFF
Martin Isenburg has put together a set of benchmarks showing compression ratios for elevation data stored as GeoTIFF. While there are some clear winners, the impressive results of DEMzip for compression are worthy of further investigation.
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Geoq: Geospatial utility belt
Horace Williams has put together a command-line toolbox for general spatial data processing and visualisation. I particularly like the ability to quickly view the results on a geojson.io map.
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Overview of differences between PROJ.4 and PROJ.6
Did you know that PROJ is nearly 40 years old? It’s crazy to think that it’s older than I am. Anyway, I digress. This is a great overview of PROJ and how it has changed over time, particularly with the latest PROJ.6 and the new functionality it brings with it.
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Mapping Mount Everest
StoryMaps are all the rage at the moment, and this one on mapping Mount Everest by Alex Tait — geographer at the National Geographic Society — is no exception. It’s a fascinating insight into an expedition to perform photogrammetry of the entire Khumbu glacier. Inspiring! |
The marvelous Mississippi River meander maps
I only stumbled across Harold Fisk’s Mississippi River meander maps in the past few years, oblivious to both their age and their sheer scale. This short article by Jason Kottke is a nice love-letter to his maps — I particularly like how he describes them as a memory of the river.
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Visualising data in Kepler with the RNLI
Ordnance Survey have put together a series of tutorials on how to visualise historic call-outs from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI). Other tutorials in the series cover how to produce similar maps using QGIS and Tableau. |
The end of the map as we know it
Chris Beddow explores the history of OpenStreetMap and how it needs to evolve to survive alongside modern techniques like mass-produced data from satellite and street view imagery. Can OSM continue to grow, or will it always be limited by its need for human interaction and validation?
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GEOSS Portal
If you’re interested in Earth observation then you’ll want to check out the GEOSS Portal — a one-stop-shop to discover all sorts of related datasets. Data can be filtered using a map or by a number of other inputs (eg. by capture date). The portal has been put together by the European Space Agency (ESA).
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Free GIS Datasets
Robin Wilson has put together a huge list of freely-available spatial datasets. It must have taken him a huge amount of time, and he’s also categorised everything so it’s easy to find. It’s a gold mine!
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National Trust opens new permanent display related to WWII maps
A new display has been opened at Hughenden — north-west of London — to shed light on the secret wartime map-making operation that happened there. They created maps for Bomber Command, including maps for the historic ‘Dambusters’ raid. What’s crazy is that this secret operation only came to light some 60 years after the war.
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NASA Applied Remote Sensing Training (ARSET)
NASA’s Applied Remote Sensing Training (ARSET) offers an ongoing series of webinars covering a variety of topics related to NASA Earth science data. They offer both introductory and advanced sessions throughout the year.
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State of the Map 2019 call for posters
Have you created a map using OpenStreetMap data? Would it look good as a poster? If that sounds like you then you might be interested in entering your map for the State of the Map poster exhibition. The posters will be displayed at the conference and will act as a centre-point for discussion during a special event.
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New Geoawesomeness job portal
The spatial community desperately needs a decent job portal that’s both easy to use and also populated with interesting and current jobs. The new Geoawesomeness job portal hopefully takes us a step closer to that — they’ve put a lot of effort into getting this set up and the results so far are promising.
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Cesium are looking for a variety of roles
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Eleanor Lutz (@eleanor_lutz)
I’ve featured Eleanor Lutz a couple of times in this newsletter, specifically for her amazing space-related maps. However, her visualisation work spans a lot more than just maps of space and I highly recommend taking a look at it on her website. I joked with Eleanor after featuring her in the first couple of issues that she should have her own dedicated section of the newsletter. I still think that would be a good idea — she’s constantly pushing out amazing maps and visualisations!
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Who inspires you from the community? I can only highlight the people that I’m aware of, so get in touch if you have someone you admire in the community who deserves some recognition. You can reply to this email or contact me on Twitter. |
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Dundee Satellite Receiving Station needs your help
Dundee Satellite Receiving Station (DSRS) has downloaded and stored images of the Earth from space for 50 years — the only satellite receiving station of its kind operating in the UK. Its public funding stopped in April and the station is now looking to source £65,000 to continue its operations and launch new projects.
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Scene From Above Podcast
I came across the Scene From Above podcast after they featured this newsletter — an easy-to-listen-to podcast that covers all things Earth observation. It’s hosted by Alastair Graham and Andrew Cutts. |
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I’m hoping to get out to Switzerland in the near future to visit the rich and engaged mapping community over there. Know of any spatial events happening this year? Would you be interested in me giving a talk at your company or local event? Or perhaps you’d like to meet up and talk all things spatial? Either way I’d love to hear from you. If we get enough interest then it might make sense to organise some kind of Spatial Awareness meetup out there. You never know, if it’s successful then it might be something we can replicate in other countries.
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Before I wrap things up I’d like to apologise for what I wrote at the end of the previous issue about “actively avoiding” content from the Esri UC. I’m hoping that my intention was clear and innocent — to avoid overloading the newsletter with content from a single source. However it could have been easily interpreted as an affront to the good work that happens by Esri employees — some of whom I know — which is not what I wanted. I’m acutely aware that I need to balance who and what I cover in this newsletter in an effort to remain diverse and independent. This is particularly important to remember so one company or source doesn’t get an unfair advantage because they’re bigger and can output more (still interesting) content at a faster pace. It’s going to take some time to find the right balance, but singling out and being unfairly negative isn’t the right way for me to achieve that. So with that out of the way, what do you think about this issue? What did you like? What didn’t you like? If you liked it then please click on the thumbs up button below as it helps me work out general sentiment. Plus the feedback helps give me energy to keep this going. Don’t forget to reply to this email if you have any feedback, suggestions for content or just want to say hi. You can also reach me on Twitter, where I’m usually posting all sorts of interesting spatial-related stuff. See you in the next one.
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