Drought Conditions

Many years ago I did a quickie blog post showing NOAA's Drought Monitor. The maps have not changed much (except being a bit easier to read) but the conditions lately have been bad enough to warrant a look at the latest map. 

The dark brown shows areas of "exceptional" drought, a step above "extreme" drought. S and L are for short and long term effects, many areas show both letters.

This NOAA map shows how much rainfall is needed to make up for the drought. In many areas it is well over a foot.

While parts of the Dallas area got over a foot of rain in the last few days, that kind of heavy rainfall tends to drain quickly and not help the situation very much. Comparing last week's map there is only a small decrease in the size of the exceptional drought area. 

Dallas - According to their own residents

A Dallas arts group Make Art with Purpose (MAP) distributed surveys asking residents to draw maps and send them back. They tried to get a broad demographic of people. Here is one made by a homeless person.

The multicolored ribbon across the center represents the transit (DART) lines. Participants included students at the CityLab high school, homeless people who attended workshops at the central library and others from around the city. These maps were taken from an article in the Dallas Morning News - MAP does not appear to show the results online.

Here is one more from the article.

Big D

Everything is bigger in Texas but Dallas just got really big according to this map at Winco Foods - via reddit.

By comparison - here are their store locations from their online map.

A closer up look shows that while they may have had fun with the  ridiculous exaggerations, their locations are also pretty awful. Duncanville is east (not west) of Arlington. Denton is not further west than Fort Worth and Carrollton is well to the west of McKinney. At least they got Lewisville sort of right.

Kennedy Assassination Infographic

Friday will be the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination. I am not well versed in the conspiracy theories. Reuters produced a good infographic/map showing the layout of Dealey Plaza that helps clarify the events.

I don't know when or where this image was originally published but there is a nice interactive version of it on speakingimage where you can zoom, pan and click a few points for details.

Dallas Typographic Map

I found this on flickr, a while back and never found the right time or excuse to post it. So here it is - a typographic map of Dallas from the photostream of  Justin Cozart.


In order to see all the little text blurbs, you need to analyze the full size version. Here is a detail:

Having only seen Dallas from a DC-9 at night I can't really comment any further.