Tag: crisis mapping

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General GIS GIS in Psychology Map Apps Slideshow

Mapping happiness

New social media mapping sites are popping up all over the place these days – whether it’s crisis-mapping sites like Sinsai.info or this new ‘happiness’ map from PhD student Alex Davies.

Davies, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge’s Computational and Biological Learning Lab, created a statistical model to analyze the sentiment (happy or sad) of Tweets from around the world.  In Davies’ model, individual words within Tweets were correlated with happiness or sadness, then used to predict the overall sentiment of the Tweet. Tweets were geo-tagged and summarized by area to calculate a composite ‘happiness’ ranking for states within the U.S. and for countries worldwide. The results are presented on Davies’ website in an interactive web map app. Raw data from the Tweets is presented alongside the maps to give viewers a sense of which Tweet words were correlated with happiness or sadness.  See below for maps of US happiness and world happiness – and an image showing some of the worldwide ‘happy’ words.

Happiness map of the United States:

 

Happiness map of the world:

Happy words for the world:

 

 

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Crisis-Mapping General GIS GIS in Political Science Map Apps Slideshow

NPR Story on Crisis Mapping in Japan

Last week NPR ran a story on crisis mapping in Japan – focusing on the open-source, citizen-driven Sinsai.info website. Here’s the description from the NPR website:

Open source software called Ushahidi allows people to add and update information to maps that anyone with an Internet connection can access. In Tokyo, a crew of volunteers is using the software to map everything — from health services to the location of emergency aid workers — in Japan’s hardest hit areas. Patrick Meier, director of the crisis mapping segment of Ushahidi, says that because of the robust Internet infrastructure in Japan and tech-savvy citizenry, online crisis mapping is being utilized to its fullest potential.

Click here to hear the NPR audio clip. Thanks to Deb for the heads up about this story!

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Crisis-Mapping Environment General GIS GIS in Political Science Slideshow Videos

NOAA visualizations of Japanese earthquake and tsunami

Below is a tsunami wave height model that shows the Pacific-wide impact of the event. The model was created by the NOAA Environmental Visualization Lab:

Description from NOAA:

Model runs from the Center for Tsunami Research at the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory show the expected wave heights of the tsunami as it travels across the Pacific basin. The largest wave heights are expected near the earthquake epicenter, off Japan. The wave will decrease in height as it travels across the deep Pacific but grow taller as it nears coastal areas. In general, as the energy of the wave decreases with distance, the near shore heights will also decrease (e.g., coastal Hawaii will not expect heights of that encountered in coastal Japan).The second image shows the depth of the Pacific Ocean floor. Notice the similarity between areas of low wave height and deeper areas of the ocean.

Below is an image visualizing the maximum amplitude plot for the tsunami wave.

Click here on the NOAA Center for Tsunami Research home page to download a Google Earth KMZ file with the maximum amplitude plot data shown in the visualization above.

And finally, a video showing the propagation of the tsunami wave.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBZGH3yieLc

From the NOAA Center for Tsunami Research:

Propagation of the March 11, 2011 Honshu tsunami was computed with the NOAA forecast method using MOST model with the tsunami source inferred from DART® data. From the NOAA Center for Tsunami Research, located at NOAA PMEL in Seattle, WA. See http://nctr.pmel.noaa.gov/honshu20110311

 

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Crisis-Mapping General GIS GIS in Political Science Slideshow

Visualizing Japan crisis map inputs

Here’s a new visualization that shows the locations worldwide that are submitting reports to the Ushahidi Japan Crisis Map. Click on the map to see full size image.

 

 

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Crisis-Mapping General GIS GIS in Political Science Slideshow

Japanese earthquake – disaster/response maps

Here are some links to maps and map apps related to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.  I’ll add more as they are released.

  • JapanQuakeMap, an animated, time-lapse visualization of the earthquake and its aftershocks created by Paul Nicholls, developer of the Christchurch Quake Map website.  From the website:
    The Japan Quake Map on this website pesents a time-lapse visualisation of the Sendai earthquake and its aftershocks, primarily to help those outside the affected area understand what the people of Japan are experiencing. It plots earthquake data from USGS on a map using the Google Maps API, with the size of the circle denoting the magnitude (the higher the magnitude, the larger the circle) and the colour showing the focal depth (see the legend below the map).
  • Click here to view the main page for Ushahidi’s Japan crisis mapping tool (in Japanese). Click here to view the Big Map. These pages use the Ushiadi platform to collect and display crowdsourced info (SMS, e-mail, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc.). About the Ushahidi site:

Anyone on the ground can text in the location of a trapped person, and these locations are then collected on a map. You can also text in where to find aid, a pop-up hospital or a precarious building that should be avoided.  Good.is

  • Also from Ushahidi, a Radiation Map that uses the Crowdmap platform.  The radiation map is in both Russian and English and has other language options available.
  • Map of seismic activity in the 7 days leading up to the earthquake – from MapLarge (note: as of Wed. March 16th the MapLarge site is down – too much traffic?)
  • What is crisis mapping and how does it work? Click here to read Patrick Meier’s answer to that. Meier is the Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi and co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers.