Warsaw in 3D

This is actually pretty cool: Warsaw in 3D

Nothing too special here - we have seen these kind of 3D cities before. What is cool is to play around with the dates & times & see how the shadows change with changing sun angles over the course of the day or year.

King Tides & El Nino!

The Local Wikipedia

This is fun: Local Wikipedia is Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you! Try it out @ https://edjefferson.com/localwiki/.

The Becket Potholes

The western side of Gobble Mountain in East Becket (MA) apparently offers some actual glacial potholes (as opposed to the fluvial ones  in Shelburne Falls). I wish one of these sources would contain a proper map that one could use to find them, but the pics are good!

• Glacial Potholes in the Gobble Highlands
• Becket Potholes Glacial Melt

The 2026/2027 'Super' El Nino

Fact: the current SSTs in the eastern tropical Pacific are about 3 deg C higher than normal and that's more than 1 deg C warmer than the powerful 1997 & 2015 El Ninos. So, what can we expect?

1. Droughts in southern Africa (e.g. Malawi, South Africa, etc.).
2. Dry conditions & wild fires in Indonesia, Malaysia, etc.
3. Dry conditions & wild fires in the Amazon region.
4. El Nino years, and especially the year after an El Nino year, are generally hotter on a global scale - so expect 2027 to be anothe record year.

More here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02939-x

This sea surface elevation comparison (1997 vs 2026 El Nino) from NASA is great: https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/el-nino-then-and-now/

Sealevel Rise & Lower

This one is actually pretty cool: https://slidingshores.com/

Now, the amount of rise & lower is getting pretty crazy & is way more than anything that could happen on Earth, but a) it's fun and b) this is the only 'animation' that I know of where you can actually lower sealevel to demonstrate conditions say during the LGM.

For a more 'realistic' sea level rise visualization: consider the Coastal Risk Finder.

AI & UHI

We all know the connection between AI, energy use, and global warming. But there is another angle: local heating, in-essence a version of the well-understood UHI. More here:

• AI Data Centers Release Heat, Posing New Problems for Cities
• Sailor et al. (2026): Data Center Waste Heat as an Emerging Urban Thermal Hazard: First Field Measurements of Neighborhood-Scale Air Temperature Impacts 

The Map Animator

This is awesome: https://mapanimator.baldinger.se/

Draw your route or drop in a GPX file, add signs and a camera move, and download it as an MP4 video, up to 4K, ready for your editor.

How To Sound Smart When Talking About Charts

How To Sound Smart When Talking About Charts is a fun little compilation of quotes with comments and context.

El Nino Impacts

Very cool interactive visual from The Climate Brink: https://dashboard.theclimatebrink.com/#impacts

The Satellites of Earth, Mars, and the Moon

We always forget: there are a bunch of satellites orbiting Mars and the Moon. Perigee brings it all together!

Relief

Relief is simple & cool: just the topography as you zoom & pan around the world. Share as link or export as image & video. One gripe: the color ramp is not that great - something more 'natural' for elevtion would be better I think.

Data, GIS, and Society Online Course

This looks interesting: The Data, GIS, and Society Online Course.

• The YouTube playlist
• The Course itself as a series of Esri Story Maps linked from an ArcGIS Experience

Ice Age Animations

These are really cool: visualization of the ice sheet(s) extend(s) across Europe during the last Ice Age. Notice the rising & lowering of sea level as well and its effect on land masses!

• Eiszeit-Europa
• IceMap

Can someone please make this for the Laurentide Ice Sheet?

Best Travel Weather

Here are some tools to help you decide when to travel & where as a function of the 'best' weather & climate:

• https://pack-lightly.com/tool/best-travel-time-worldmap/
• https://seasonmap.app/map

Ice in Antarctica

We know that ice started to form in Antarctica some 34 million years ago while that did not happen in the Northern Hemisphere until about 20 million years ago - why? Elevation! GHG concentrations and thus temperatures slowly declined over the last several 10s of millions of years. At the same time, Antarctica saw tectonic uplift and at some point the rising land and falling temperatures meant that the glaciation level dropped to below the land elevation and it became possible to snow to persist year-around - cool!

EDEN

EDEN = Extension Disaster Education Network

Could be useful in case we as GPS go into this direction.

The Ozone Hole: Bigger Connections

Well-done Cleo! This video offers great context centered around three important dates or decision points: 1959, 1987, and 2026. Watch the last minute or whole thing:

 

AI & Data Viz

Or, to make it simpler: Making charts with AI (as opposed doing it yourself with MS Excel). Good stuff here from the folks at Storytelling With Data: https://www.storytellingwithdata.com/ai-data-storytelling

485 Million Years!

Good WP article & PBS Terra video!

• The REAL STORY of Climate Skeptics New Favorite Graph
• Scientists have captured Earth’s climate over the last 485 million years. Here’s the surprising place we stand now.

What are the take-home messages? CO2 is the main climate driver and climate change is normal. Yep, but: the climate change we are measuring today is a) much faster than anything over the last 485 million years and b) caused by humans, not by nature.