Old Weather

Old Weather is a classic citizen-science effort - transcribing reams of old ship logs to better quantify past environmental conditions. And: the past is the key to the future! More about it on over on FiveThirtyEight.

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power

ArcticDEM

ArcticDEM is an NGA-NSF public-private initiative to automatically produce a high-resolution, high quality, digital surface model (DSM) of the Arctic using optical stereo imagery, high-performance computing, and open source photogrammetry software.

So, if you a) work in the Arctic and b) need a DEM, this may be a great option for you.

Very cool: the Arctic DEM Explorer (running on Esri ArcGIS Online).

The Paleobiology Database

The Paleobiology Database (PBDB) is a great effort: interactive web maps and all the data available for download.

Loopy

Loopy is a really cool interactive tool for systems modeling - think concepts maps, but with quantitative interactions (think Stella, but free).

Mapping the Meandering Mississippi

This is very cool: hand-drawn maps of the meandering Mississippi - beautiful and insightful.

How about an artificial sun?

Seems crazy at first, but makes sense: to best use the real Sun to make sustainable energy it is beneficial to have a fake sun in the controlled environment of the lab. More here.

Highlights of Global Climate 2016

Highlights of Global Climate 2016 (by the WMO) presents, well, the climate of 2016 as an Esri Story Map.

Good one!

Yale Climate Opinion Maps – U.S. 2016

The Yale Climate Opinion Maps – U.S. 2016 show what people think across the country (by county) about aspects of climate change. The map for 'Global Warming is happening' gives some hope, but then the map 'Global Warming is caused mostly by human activities' is much more sobering.

National Transportation Noise Map

The National Transportation Noise Map shows, well, noise levels from roads and aviation. It's neat to see the takeoff and landing noise patterns around airports.

Esri’s new Landsat Explorer web app

Esri’s new Landsat Explorer web app is great and adds some nice new features: you can compare different dates, you can download the layer as raster file, and you define your band indexes.

The Hemispheres, Toilet Swirls, and the Coriolis Force

Smarter Every Day and Veritasium combine to find the definitive answer.

• The Truth About Toilet Swirl - Northern Hemisphere
• The Truth About Toilet Swirl - Southern Hemisphere
• Watch both videos synchronized!
• The whole story in one video

Worldpop

From their website: The WorldPop project was initiated in October 2013 to combine the AfriPop, AsiaPop and AmeriPop population mapping projects. It aims to provide an open access archive of spatial demographic data sets for Central and South America, Africa and Asia to support development, disaster response and health applications.

Drone Delivery and what3words

what3words is a new global addressing system that divides the world into a grid of 3m x 3m squares and assigns each one a unique 3-word address. In other words it is much more consistent than street addresses and much easier to remember than latitude and longitude.

Drones use what3words addresses system to deliver packages gives examples how emerging drone delivery services are using what3words for navigation to customers and their landing sites.

Using Esri Business Analyst

Learn How To Use Business Analyst More Effectively compiles three nice and quick videos showing you what you can do with Esri's Business Analyst. The one about suitability analysis is embedded below.

Land Viewer

Land Viewer is great: select your Landsat or Sentinal image and then run you analysis on it - all online and fast - and you can even specify your own band combinations / band ratios.

Here's a great example: Quelccaya Ice Cap 10 May 2016

Climate Change Facts from NASA

Climate Change Facts from NASA: evidence, causes, effects, scientific consensus, vital signs, and FAQ.

Drive-Time Maps

Here are a couple of nice online examples:

• Isoscope
• Walkshed.js

The Most Average City

Lynchburg, Virginia: The Most Typical (aka Average) City in America

Planet Explorer

Planet Explorer lets you explore images from a fleet of 149 satellites - across the globe and back in time.

Richard Dawkins in Science

Hivemapper

Share your drone videos as 3D maps via https://hivemapper.com/. Or, explore some really cool drone footage.

NSIDC GoLIVE App

The Global Land Ice Velocity Extraction from Landsat 8 (GoLIVE) Map Application allows users to spatially search for and download land ice velocities derived from panchromatic imagery collected from May 2013 to present.

• Here's the data set.
• Here's the web app.
• Here's the User Guide.

How to make a globe!

This is interesting: Globe Making (1955). Makes you realize how easy is today to access free 3D maps from anywhere on any device and how special a globe was back in the days.