Donald on Twitter

From the The Upshot: Donald Trump’s Twitter Insults: The Complete List (So Far)

Homo Sapiens: Child of the Ice Age

Homo Sapiens: Child of the Ice Age is a nice interactive visualization / Story Map of humans and the environment over the last 4 million years.

Mapping Creationism

Well-done by Slate: Mapping Publicly Funded Schools That Are Allowed to Teach Creationism.

Mapping with Tableau Public

Tableau is great for web-based interactive data viz, including maps, for example 7 Different Types of Tableau Public Maps. And why not! Maps are really just charts using geospatial data.

Mundialis

Seen on Maps Mania: Mundialis Topography Layer

Glittering Blue

Glittering Blue is cool (maybe a tad too big perhaps).

Meet Jonas!

Great MODIS image of the snow accumulation from Jonas (24 January 2016).

A Journey of a Thousand Map Units Begins With a Single Dataset–GIS 101 is a nice introduction to GIS using QGIS.

The World Bank Gender Data Portal

Data, interactive charts, maps, and tables, plus all that available for export or download: The World Bank Gender Data Portal.

Warming 1880 - 2015 (NASA)

NWS Weather Event Display

So...how much snow did you get? The NWS Weather Event Display gives you that answer - just select Snowfall under Observed Reports.

Lake Poopo (Bolivia)

Lake Poopo in Bolivia is essentially gone - here is a image comparison between 2013 and 2016 using Landsat 8 images.

2 May 2000

GPS pre/post 2 May 2000

This seems so long ago...but before 2 May 2000 the US artificially degraded GPS accuracy in what was called Selective Availability. Below are two nice plots before and after (more here):

Vizonomy

Vizonomy looks like a great tool for climate change risk assessment, but I'm afraid it may be expensive to use.

Bird Migration

This animated bird migration map by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is great. Another option is The Globe Of Bird Migration.

800,000 Years of CO2

Pumphandle 2014: History of atmospheric carbon dioxide is a great visualization of atmospheric CO2 in all its measured variability: seasonal, interannual, humans, and over glacial-interglacial cycles.

Mapping Time

Geography is to space what history is to time. So, to map in-space we have things such as Esri Story Maps, Google My Maps, etc. To map in-time you can use, for example, Dipity or Timeglider.

Winter and Summer in 2100

What will it be like for folks in 2100 during the winter and during the summer?

Tableau and Mapbox

In case you are interested: Tableau 9.2 is now integrated with Mapbox.

1850 to 2010 Foreign-Born Population

1850 to 2010 Foreign-Born Population is very cool and very complex = too much!

The GIS Guide to Public Domain Data

The GIS Guide to Public Domain Data has now updated data exercises.

Housing Values Cartograms

I'm a big fan of cartograms and The Housing Value of Every County in the U.S. has several great ones:

The website has an interactive version!

Or, as an animated GIF:

Guns vs. Coffee

Just enter your zip code and Firearms + Frappuccinos shows you how many gun stores and Starbucks are located within 30 miles. In my case (01301): 52 gun stores and 3 Starbucks.

http://www.flightconnections.com/

This is actually somewhat useful to get a general idea on how you can get from A to B with a plane: http://www.flightconnections.com/

The Power of Data Visualization

Updated Glacier Mass Balance Data

The folks @ Trent have updated their global glacier mass balance data:

• Mass Balance of Small Glaciers
• Global Analysis of Mass Balance

Depsy

Depsy is really two things. First, a place to find 'weird' (=highly-specialized) software programs and tools written be someone somewhere. Second, it somehow tracks how often these tools are used/cited and that may be useful during the tenure and promotion process. Read more about it in Nature.

Similar sites: Crantastic (for R) and PyPI for Python.

Median Ages Around The World

These animated GIFs are interesting and difficult to interpret without knowing absolute rates of population growth, but the rise in median age is striking!

• Africa
• Middle East
• Asia-Pacific
• Europe
• Americas

State Population 2014-2015

Mount Taranaki / Egmont

I climbed Mount Taranaki / Egmont back in 1991.

Refugees in Europe and elsewhere

Today's global refugee crisis mapped in time and space. Note: I'm not necessarily sure that there indeed a 'crisis' today any more than several years ago - it just seems that refugees in 2015 have been showing-up on the door steps of the rich countries as opposed to 'getting-stuck' somewhere along the way.

• Refugee crisis exposes deep divide in Europe is a nice interactive data viz. What's a little confusing (or maybe the point they want to get across?) is that they are showing total number of asylum applications on the map and normalized values on the bar chart.
• Global Refugee Populations 1975-2010 uses a 3D globe, but you can also animated the data over time - very nice.
• The flow towards Europe is just slick.
• Or, here as a simple infographic.

Want to see more? Have a look at the The 2015 refugee crisis in visualizations over on Visualoop.

El Nino!

Great reading and cool video What to expect from El Niño: North America by Kevin Trenberth.

The Karakoram Anomaly

Nicely-done by NASA: The Karakoram Anomaly

Make your own 3D Planet!

Planet 3D also falls under the category: Cool, but useful how? Read more about it over on Maps Mania.

Lichtenstein Map

The Roy Lichtenstein Map falls under the category: Cool, but Useful How?

New Esri Hillshade Layer

A Hillshade Everyone Can Use

The 21 Best Data Visualization Tools: Charts, Graphs & Maps

The 21 Best Data Visualization Tools: Charts, Graphs & Maps is a bit misleading as it only covers the 21 best (according to the author) JavaScript libraries for charts and graphs.

Guesstimate

This is super-cool: Guesstimate is basically a spreadsheet, but for things that aren’t certain (like everything). You define your own uncertainty range for each variables and Guesstimate performs 5000 Monte Carlo simulations performed find the output interval for each equation, all in the browser. More here.

Climate Change and Math

Here are a bunch of interesting resources related to using math to learn about climate change or using climate change questions to learn about math:

• 394 Math Methods Climate Change Lesson Plans (San Jose State U.)
• Mathematics of Planet Earth (MPE)
• The Mathematics of Climate (U. of Minnesota)

Online Climate Models

• The Very, Very Simple Climate Model (UCAR)
• Java Climate Model (UCL-TECLIM)
• EdGCM (Columbia University)
• Climate and Carbon Cycle Models (U. of Chicago)
• Simple Climate Models to play with in the classroom (compilation)
• Use of mathematics (climateprediction.net)

Full disclosure: I have not used any of this!

Climate Countdown

Climate Countdown is a nice 12-part video series about the COP / UNFCCC process leading-up to the COP 21 Conference in Paris (December 2015).