Nature has a special issue on Earth monitoring out tonight.
Excerpt
Nearly fifty years ago —things were up and running by March 1958 — Charles Keeling and colleagues began a series of measurements of atmospheric CO2 on Mauna Loa in Hawaii. The results, made graphic in the jagged ‘Keeling curve’ running across this week’s cover, made the world take notice — eventually. The Mauna Loa measurements constitute the longest continuous record of atmospheric CO2 in the world. The steady rise in CO2 that they record now forms the accepted backdrop to today’s climate science and economic and political decision making. As well as being an important resource in itself, the Mauna Loa record highlights the vital importance of Earth monitoring programmes. The fiftieth anniversary of the start of this work is marked in this issue by News Features and other pieces on the Earth monitoring being done today, historical pieces on the Mauna Loa data and more.
I’ve a long futuristic article in the special looking at how close we might be to a totally monitored Earth by 2025: Earth Monitoring: The planetary panopticon
Nature itself has an great editorial — Patching together a world view — which provides a great big picture view, that I’d have struggled to write, so kudos to my colleagues who did such a good job of capturing succintly such a vast topic.
Alex Witze then contrasts my upbeat forecast with the lack of leadership of, and the disarray in, the US’s current Earth monitoring programmes — Earth Observation: Not enough eyes on the prize.
And the journalistic content doesn’t stop there: there are also features on:
Earth Monitoring: Observing the ocean from within
Earth Monitoring: The crucial measurement
And to finish it all off there are two Commentaries by scientists
Earth monitoring: Cinderella science
Earth monitoring: Vigilance is not enough
And an online version of all is here, including a timeline of Earth monitoring.
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The UK National Institute for Environmental eScience (NIEeS) recently organized a scientific workshop at Cambridge University on environmental research applications of Google Earth and other virtual globes; some of the presentations are now available online here.
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For what it’s worth, Georges Bush tonight commended the Darfur layers in Google Earth built by a group of volunteers (including yours truly), and endorsed by Google and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. On news@nature.com tonight, I tell the story of how this project evolved.
To read more of that history, see below:
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I’m pleased to let you know about Crisis in Darfur, a Google Earth layer that assembles data, photographs, and eyewitness testimony and which will be officially announced today by Google and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. It will appear in Google Earth under the Global Awareness layer in the left hand panel of Google Earth .
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I’ve updated the flu maps to this weekend — link here.. Since August, the spread of avian flu, as reported, has shown a lull, with only a few animal outbreaks, reported, in Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Egypt, China and South Korea. Over the same period there have been 10 human cases in Indonesia, and 1 in Egypt.
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This blog is 1 year old today. I’d like to say thanks to all of you for visiting, and often getting in touch.
It’s been an eventful year, with content mostly a mix of posts — too-infrequent 
— on GIS, avian flu and public health, computing, and, of late, the venue for disseminating information on the Libya HIV case, and the campaign to free the six medical workers facing the death penalty — see here and here.
I’ve an article in today’s Nature — Amazon puts network power online — on an interesting form of computing-on-demand from Amazon, that might appeal to many scientists — it is in beta. It costs $0.10 per computing hour, and to store data for $0.15 per gigabyte per month. To get started, see the FAQ, and a guide here.
Excerpt
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Reporters Without Borders released its annual worldwide press freedom index on 23 October. Ive made a quick Google Earth map of the data — click here to view and see screenshot below.
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Greg kindly posted a comment to my earlier post on the CIESIN poverty maps, to let me know that CIESIN is making GE versions of its data via WMS. I’m promoting it to a post. I’ve made a network link to view some of his files here; the resolution of the images increases as one zooms in.
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Google Earth last week introduced new functionality that allows one to map events against time. Clearly this is the ideal way to view the spread of avian flu worldwide, so I have adapted my existing flu maps to it. Only the new maps will be updated. The new link for the time-enabled maps is this one (the KML file).
You WILL NOT be able to view these maps correctly using the standard Google Earth client. You MUST FIRST install the latest GE 4.0 beta — download link here.
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H5n1 maps have been updated — link here. You will notice that there has been a large decrease in the number of outbreaks reported over the last month.
We had a couple of pieces in last week’s Nature on the threat of H5N1 to the Americas — all free access- see :
Avian Flu and the New World
How might it get there?
and
State’s flu response raises concern.
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Last weekend’s scheduled weekly update to the flu maps finally went up tonight, after I found the bug that was causing export errors in the update. Download map directly here.
This week’s update, including the first bird case in Scotland, will go up this weekend.
Featured image from this week: Egypt
(Circles = animal outbreaks; triangles = human cases)
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I’d been thinking of documenting the process of using Arc2Earth to quickly export existing GIS data to Google Earth format, as used in the avian flu maps. But Brian Flood, who built Arc2Earth, has now posted a walk-through guide that does the job. See Getting Data into Google Earth using Arc2Earth
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UPDATE — SEPT 2006; the links below are to the old maps; to see the new time-enabled versions, click HERE – UPDATE
New Google Earth maps of avian flu spread
This is the new beta of an operational service designed to provide Google Earth maps of avian flu spread on a weekly basis for the first time. As well as mapping human cases and poultry outbreaks, the maps also provide additional data on each event, and additional datasets, such as poultry densities worldwide, to let you explore avian flu.
The fact that the maps can now be regularly updated has been made possible largely through technical improvements in the initial beta map computing infrastructure , and new volunteer support in data management.
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Barely a month after Google Earth made the front cover of Nature, computing is back on the cover again. Tomorrow’s issue contains a big special on the future of scientific computing. All the articles are free, thanks to sponsorship from Microsoft; the special was produced in conjunction with the 2020 report published today by an international group of experts convened by Microsoft. The special is, however, of course completely editorially-independent of Microsoft
The special, by journalists and top computing experts, looks at some of the key emerging technologies and concepts that look set to have a major impact on scientific computing by 2020. I’ve a three pager on “sensor webs†– “2020 computing: Everything, everywhere†— in it; there is also a short pop-up box — “Batteries not included” — on the problems of powering these small remote devices.
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I’ve a short article in Nature tonight summarising the situation on H5N1 and cats. I first raised this issue in an article a month back, before the first cases of cat infections in Germany and Austria.
Thought you might enjoy this excerpt.
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In an earlier post, I discussed one of the big obstacles to wider use of Google Earth in science: much professional spatial data are in shapefile format and need to be converted to KML, the format GE uses, to be viewed in Google Earth. Several converters have emerged including KMLer, KML Home Companion, and Export to KML, and the Pro version of Google Earth allows import of shapefiles.
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Journalists researching articles come across many interesting web resources, but whereas a few key ones might be linked to in the final published articles, most remain on the journalists’ hard drives, never used or exploited again by themselves, let alone others. During my research into scientific applications of virtual globes, such as Google Earth — articles linked to here — I checked out many web resources. Given that these resources might be useful to others, I’ve now made them all public on Connotea, the free social bookmarking service for science professionals.
In a sense, I’m sharing with everyone some of my effort put into researching the topic, with the thinking that my link collection might provide starting points that are an alternative, and more select, starting point than a Google search for virtual globes and science.
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What on Earth is Google Earth doing on the front cover of Nature, the international weekly journal of science?
This week’s issue contains several pieces on virtual globes, and all are on free access. I’ve written a three-page feature — Virtual globes: The web-wide world – on the various ways scientists are beginning to use virtual globes, such as Google Earth and Nasa’s World Wind. And Al Gore, former US vice-president, who envisioned the Digital Earth in 1998, also gives his thoughts on the new developments, and his initial vision. “Its highest purpose was to use the Earth itself as an organizing metaphor for digital information,” he says in the article.
I discuss the feature in an accompanying podcast.
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Given the current interest in the outbreak of H5N1 in Turkey, I’ve exceptionally manually updated the Google Earth global avian flu outbreak maps to show the location of the latest human cases in Turkey (red dots), and links to relevant WHO updates.
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This week’s Nature podcast features a short interview with me on Google Earth.
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[2007: NOTE THAT THE MAP BELOW IS NOW OLD: MORE RECENT AND UPDATED TIME SERIES MAPS ARE AVAILABLE AT THIS LINK -- http://declanbutler.info/blog/?p=58 ]
Nature has a Google Earth map of avian flu outbreaks online tonight.
Download the network link directly from here.
It accompanies an article I’ve published in Nature: “Mashups mix data into global service.” The article also has a box on methods; a shorter version of this post: “Nature gets mashed up.”
The visualization of avian flu outbreaks is the first online map, to my knowledge, of each of the more than 1800 individual outbreaks of avian flu in birds that have been reported over the past two years. It also provides a geographical overview of confirmed human cases of infection with the H5N1 influenza virus.
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Google Earth has set new standards for visualizing geographical information systems (GIS) data. Great for viewing the world’s sightseeing spots, your house, or the nearest hotels and restaurants at your business, or, holiday destination. But that’s a bit limited. The full extent of rich scientific, and other, GIS datasets often cannot yet be easily converted for viewing in Google Earth, because of differences in formats. Speak to anyone at various geographical or scientific databases these days and you often hear the same question: “How can we get our data into Google Earth?†New computing tools are now emerging, however, that are changing this situation.
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A Mac version of Google Earth is finally on the way. It’s reviewed here.
Via Ogle Earth
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