Wanting to catch a look at some wildflowers in SoCal? You might still have some time. Check out this app by SCAG. Using precipitation, windstorm, natural habitats, and open space data, they mapped likely wildflower blooms and potential superblooms. You can also overlay transit data to plan your trip!
The City Health Dashboard is an online resource with community-level health, social, and economic data for the 500 largest cities in the US. The dashboard reports on 36 key measures of health, such as obesity and opioid overdose deaths, as well as the conditions that influence health, such as housing affordability and reading proficiency. The dashboard represents a first of its kind effort to provide city and neighborhood level data from multiple national sources, creating a one stop online resource to help city leaders and residents pinpoint and take action on gaps in health and opportunity. Check it out!
Interesting article about mapping the ocean floor. I did not know that only 15% of the ocean floor has been mapped so far. An idea to “crowd source” ocean floor mapping is taking hold, using volunteer cargo ships, fishing boats, and pleasure craft to transmit data in real time.
Radio Garden is an interactive globe that allows visitors to listen to over 8,000 live radio stations from around the world. When you visit the site, radio stations are loaded and then you will be directed to the radio station closest to your current location. From there, you can explore other stations around the globe. Cities with multiple participating stations will have a list appear on the right side of the browser, allowing you to choose which station to listen to. By selecting the History tab or the Jingles tab, you can explore historic radio broadcasts and station jingles from across time and space. Check it out!
Check out this 1915 perspective map of Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Mountains, created by the Automobile Club of Southern California.
You can see some town names that do not exist anymore, like Savannah and Lordsburg.
Check out this Library of Congress post about the “father of temperature mapping”, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), who devised the concept of the isotherm. Cool maps!
Working on a choropleth map? Check out this article about when to use them and when not to, how to make them better, and some examples of good ones.
Also read this companion article (click below) about how different patterns become visible depending on the area unit you choose.
While helping out someone that was looking for fatal accident data, I ran across a cool map service hosted by the US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Looking at the REST endpoint for their map services, I found the National Transportation Noise Map. The service description reads:
The National Transportation Noise Map is developed using a 24-hr equivalent sound level (LEQ, denoted by LAeq) noise metric. The results are A-weighted noise levels that represent the approximate average noise energy due to transportation noise sources over the 24 hour period at the defined receptors. This map includes simplified noise modeling and is intended for the tracking of trends, it should not be used to evaluate noise levels in individual locations and/or at specific times. https://maps.bts.dot.gov/noise/
If you click on the link in the description, it will take you to a document that outlines how the noise levels were collected and processed. A few points about the data:
Adding the image service to ArcMap displayed this in the LA basin area:
I then changed the color ramp so high noise levels were red and low noise levels were blue.
Pretty cool … unless you live near LAX!
Who does your taxes? H&R Block? TurboTax? A CPA/Tax Professional? Yourself? Check out this web map by ESRI. ESRI says it used data at the census tract and block group level. It looked at whether taxpayers used H&R Block, TurboTax, a certified public accountant or other tax professional, or did their taxes on their own. ESRI then credited that block to which ever method was used the most. Click on a point and get the breakdown of tax methods.
January 2023 NOTE: The Stuff in Space website has moved. The link to the site has been updated.
Stuff in Space is a “real-time 3D map of objects in earth’s orbit”, including satellites and debris. This map uses data from Space-Track.org, a website operated by the U.S. Department of Defense. On this map, different kinds of “stuff in space” are color-coded: red for satellites, blue for rocket bodies, and grey for debris. Visitors may also explore different groups of space objects, which include maps of all Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites and their orbits and a map of the debris created by the 2009 collision of the satellites Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251. Check it out!
