From this point on, this blog will appear as one of EDF’s blogs at:
EDF’s Climateatlas
Please adjust your bookmarks and hopefully this is the permanent home of the atlas!
Almost anywhere you go in the United States, you will find a renewable resource that can be used as energy. If we develop the infrastructure, we can become energy independent and sustainable at the same time. Not a bad way to be huh?
Here are some short explanations and links to learn more.
Biomass refers to any biological residue like the waste from wood products, corn, landfills, even human waste. The map shows our resources, shaded by county.
Solar Energy is pretty self explanatory on the surface. Dig deeper though, and you’ll see that there are many different ways to capture solar energy. This map shows the resource for the most common technology, photovoltaics. However, the map for the other technologies is very similar: where it’s sunny much of the year, the solar resources are strong.
Americans have become more accustomed to wind power. In places like Oklahoma and Texas, wind farms are popping up. This map shows the windiest areas of the nation…on and offshore.
Geothermal energy utilizes the heat from the earth. There are various ways to harvest this energy, which is concentrated in the west. I haven’t seen a really great map of geothermal resources, but this one should get the point across: dig deep enough almost anywhere and you’ll find heated groundwater…the basis for geothermal power.
Happy Memorial Day!
I grew up in New England. I still love the Sox, the Pats, and am rooting for the Celtics to be the first team in NBA history to go 16-0 at home and 0-12 away. So making and exploring this map has a certain emotional potency. I spent some time in Martha’s Vineyard. Time on the cape. Both are highly vulnerable to sea level rise and of course storm surge. None of this is really news, except I didn’t know that Fenway Park could be like San Francisco’s AT&T park in a 3.5 meter rise: the water will literally be on Landsdowne St.
This data comes from the US EPA. While the data doesn’t have quite the resolution of some of the other sea level rise maps I’ve made, the data has been verified by the government, and covers the entire US coast. The scale the data is appropriate for is approx 1:250,000.
Excellent interview with Woods Hole researchers
These people may have figured out how much the Amazon would cost to cut down, how much it would be worth to sell, and how much it will take to change the economic dynamics with a carbon market. Very cool stuff!
Google’s Lat Long Blog has a story on a climate change data publishing collaboration. The Met Office Hadley Center along with the British Gov’t show maps of future projections and what’s going on in Antarctica.
ok I tweaked the projections map to include the Met office KML…pretty cool stuff!
This map is part of the ‘Solutions’ category of the ClimateAtlas. It is a map that will change through time as edits become necessary. Hopefully we can even get a ‘what are you doing to reduce your carbon?’ map up here. As of right now, I have regional climate initiatives, clean car standard states, and world cities pledging to cut their greenhouse gases, as well as a news feed from the Pew climate center…an authority on what’s going on and who’s doing something about it…
Use the radio buttons to see different scenarios. The plus sign is for zooming in, the minus sign zooms out, the arrows pan the map, or you can use the mouse. The sea level rise data is in translucent blue, and if you zoom in too far the data goes away.
The input box above the map lets you type in addresses or places and will find them for you. For this map, only New York Metro places would be relevant to find. Here are some samples you can try out:
World Trade Center
Statue of Liberty
Newark Airport
Yankee Stadium
Wall Street
Maxwell’s 1039 Washington St Hoboken, NJ 07030
What other areas are threatened? Feel free to find more and blog it.
Ideally, the climateatlas would have some sort of user generated content. While it would be cool to make it all interactive, we, as of this date, don’t have the programming capability nor the moolah to make it happen. In the meantime, if any of you out there in the blogosphere have any ideas or already useful databases related to climate change, please let us at the climateatlas know. Hopefully we can publish your data without too much fuss!
Sea level rise in the Lone Star state. Hang on to your Shiner Bocks people. Galveston, though well prepared and experienced with hurricanes, will mostly be underwater in a 10 foot sea level rise scenario. Granted, subsidence and storm surge aren’t even used in these maps, so things could look a bit worse, especially with monster category 5 storms spinning toward the petrochemical capital of the world, Harris County Texas. Hopefully by that time our reliance upon fossil fuel infrastructure will have waned to the point of irrelevance.
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This recently created map’s source is the Vulcan Project, a wonderful and insightful scientific inquiry into the spatial patterns of co2 pollution in the United States. I took their excel summary by county, feeling it would be sufficient to drum up an interesting mashup. On top of it I put the point sources (mostly power plants) that I got from the EIA. And then of course the congressional districts. Zoom in on the map and you can see who’s district you’re looking at.
There’s lots of potential ways to classify this data. I debated about showing a per capita map. If there’s enough interest I’ll add it. But for now, raw totals for county should be ok. As always, these maps work best in firefox.
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