Earth Animations

Earth is a project from Cameron Beccario showing a wide range of climatic conditions that can be animated. Here are the winds animated from Hurricane Florence as it made landfall on September 14th.

At the same time an even more intense Typhoon Mangkhut battering the Philippines.

You can choose to look at air or ocean currents, waves, water and air temperatures (at different heights)  and various other factors. You can even switch map projections. Here are ocean waves using the Waterman Butterfly projection,

and ocean currents in the North Atlantic, looking very Van Gogh-like.

Data are from various global sensors, the geographic data comes from Natural Earth. The visualizations are created in the browser using javascript programming. The color schemes are intuitive enough that no legend is required. Here is the three hour precipitation accumulation over North Carolina from the hurricane.

Another option is the probability of seeing an aurora.

Explore more here

Warsaw Transit Animation

One of my readers, a student at UNIGIS Krakow sent me this video showing the growth of rail transit in Warsaw.
If you want to open it in a separate window here is the link.
Below are a couple of still frames, they show not only the growth of the rail lines, but also the expansion of the city's boundaries.

The white lines are street trams. Green is a commuter rail line and red is subway. Much of the expansion has happened in the last 10 years with the rapid development of the SKM urban rail - the orange lines.

 Here's a map of the SKM system.

The video was created using QGIS Time Manager software. The credits listed on the video are worth repeating here.

Basemap is cartometric and was created using open source GIS software - QGIS (http://qgis.org) and Time Manager for QGIS - plugin developed by Anita Graser (http://anitagraser.com).

During work on the film, authors based on datasets created by Magdalena Trzebiatowska, OpenStreetMap project, TRASBUS and TRAMWAR websites archive and GIS data shared by Geodesy and Cadastre Office of the Capital City of Warsaw.

This film is a result of „group project” realized during the UNIGIS Krakow study program (more at: http://krakow.unigis.net), and was made by UNIGIS students: Jakub Bobrowski, Joanna Gosztowtt, Paweł Hawryło, Jacek Kuskowski and Kamil Onoszko under the supervision of a UNIGIS tutor - dr Małgorzata Luc.

If you look any of this up on Google Maps today, you might find that the Vistula, the main river in Warsaw has dried up. I hope they get their water back soon.