Back again with three items worth mentioning.
1) ClimateWizard
Do you like doing 'What if?' climate scenarios without all the muss and fuss of building your own computer model or getting a PhD in hydroclimatology? Want to see which places to avoid and which will have ample water supplies in 2050? Or maybe you just want to annoy your friends at the Heartland Institute or indulge in some good old-fashioned displacement behavior? Then The Nature Conservancy's ClimateWizard is for you!
From the WWW site:
With ClimateWizard you can:
- view historic temperature and rainfall maps for anywhere in the world
- view state-of-the-art future predictions of temperature and rainfall around the world
- view and download climate change maps in a few easy steps
ClimateWizard enables technical and non-technical audiences alike to
access leading climate change information and visualize the impacts anywhere on Earth. The first generation of this web-based program allows the user to choose a state or country and both assess how climate has changed over time and to project what future changes are predicted to occur in a given area. ClimateWizard represents the first time ever the full range of climate history and impacts for a landscape have been brought together in a user-friendly format.
The image shown is the annual precipitation for New Mexico in 2080 under a medium emissions scenario and an ensemble average of GCMs. The yellow-green indicates a lot less precipitation (up to 50% lower) than today's.
Give it a try - it's fun (well, not necessarily).
Thanks to developers Chris Zganjar, Evan Girvetz, and Geroge Raber.
2) Pacific Institute's Interactive Maps of California Climate Change Vulnerability
The Pacific Institute has just produced a study (download the full report or abstract) that maps social vulnerability to climate change in California and identifies the need for adaptation planning.
From the report's WWW site:
New research shows that addressing social vulnerability – the susceptibility of a given community to harm from a hazard – in climate change policies and response strategies is critical to California’s future. With some degree of climate change unavoidable, communities must begin
developing and implementing adaptation plans, and integrating social vulnerability into their strategies is key.
California faces a range of impacts from global climate change, including increases in extreme heat, wildfires, and coastal flooding and erosion. Changes are also likely to occur in air quality, water availability, and the spread ofinfectious diseases. Social and economic factors – like age, race, income, lack of access to a vehicle or other means of transportation – directly affect a community’s ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from climate impacts. The report Social Vulnerability to Climate Change in California identifies geographic areas within the state with such heightened risk to projected climate impacts.
You can view an online map of the state showing the modified social vulnerability index (based on 19 factors) for California census tracts. For individual maps for each of the 19 factors, click here.
Excellent work from authors Heather Cooley, Eli Moore, Matthew Heberger, and Lucy Allen!
3) USAID Development Data Available on ArcGIS Online
Friend and colleague Dawn Wright, who's serving a stint as Esri's Chief Scientist, alerted me to this via Twitter.
From the WWW site:
Last month, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) launched the agency’s first-ever crowdsourcing initiative to clean and map development data such as guarantees, loans disbursed, and available financing. Volunteers used a simple crowdsourcing tool created with Esri technology to find the required location information. This data can now be easily visualized on an Esri Story Map and in ArcGIS Online, providing better insight for the private sector to explore new areas for collaboration with host countries, researchers, development organizations, and the public.
USAID’s GeoCenter worked in cooperation with the agency’s Development Credit Authority (DCA) to identify a global dataset of approximately 117,000 records to map and make available to the public. The data cleaning and geocoding process was crowdsourced to volunteer technical communities including the Standby Task Force (SBTF) and GISCorps. All the work was completed in just 16 hours—44 hours earlier than expected.
Check this out!
Enjoy!
"The whole (global warming) thing is created to destroy America's free enterprise system and our economic stability." - Jerry Falwell
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