Historic climate data revisited - 5 - live polar maps

Here are the maps promised at the end of the last post c/w description in that post:

Historic climate data revisited - 4 - polar is POpuLAR

[Update: Part 5 will be the last installment as mentioned at the bottom of this blog-post]

Having explored polar maps here, here and here, was it ever a delight to find one of the earliest maps in that same projection! In This Is the World's Largest and Oldest Map, Culture Trip report how David Rumsey recreated a digital copy of a 1587 map from Milan in no less than 60 pieces:

Historic climate data revisited - 3 - circum-Arctic update

[Update: Part 4 provides a further update on platforms available to map polar data]

In my previous blog, how many layers can be combined in an arresting polar Arctic view. They show the almost zero overlap of historic and current weather and climatic data. They herald the importance of oceanic climate data going back before 1880, when any weather data get scarce.

Historic climate data revisited - 2 - circum-Arctic

[Update: more data for the Arctic were found here and here when writing a paper

Note: Part 3 adds World Port Index data compared to historic Gazetteer
Follow-on class materials the last two blogposts generated are posted here.
Go also to section 5: Arctic / Antarctica GIS application, of 1000 GIS applications ]

Following on the Antarctic blogpost, I took my lessons-learned to the antipodes for these reasons:

Historic climate data revisited - 1 - circum-Antarctic

[Update 2: this series has full CC BY-SA 3.0 class notes here
Update 1: please see a mirror project for the Arctic in Part 2.]

With ongoing debates whether Antarctic ice in increasing or not, and its effect on climate change, we must avail ourselves of as much data as we can. If historic climate data is at hand, not only do they get scarcer going farther back, but 1880 also marks a time prior to which their reliability falls off.

So having mapped climate data off tall ships captains logs from 1750 to 1850, I wondered how far south they sailed, and how much they augmented historic climate data around the Antarctic?

Web Maps on Steroids, Part II

I showed a couple of months ago ways to post mega-datasets online without choking the system. This month OSGeoUK gave me the opportunity to present the same on PostGIS Day 2014, as postGIS was the backbone of two of these examples on GIScloud and GeoCloud2. Thanks to OSGeoUK and British Computer Society for hosting this.

Web maps on steroids

The last 6 blog posts over the last 3 months chronicled the use of dynamic maps using time attribute - years for historic ship tracks and wind data from same 150-350 yrs ago - not to animate maps but to filter them by decade and manage data fetches on ArcGIS Online. A parallel series of posts showed mega data sets on Amazon Web Services, as Mapcentia assured me postGIS handled giga datasets...

On joining and merging historic multi-lingual geodata

Earlier posts chronicled the history even the beauty of historic shipping and climate data from CLIWOC. British, Dutch, French and Spanish maritime agencies transferred paper logs to digital records. In doing so look-up tables allowed to convert multi-lingual records into quantifiable attributes. Something odd (to me) happened in the process of mapping these: over 1/4M records doubled to almost 1/2M when look-ups were joined and then wind and direction tables merged to create maps symbolised by wind force and orientation.

The happenstance art of maps

I showed recently how CLIWOC weather data from ships captains logs dating 1662 to 1885 totalled almost 1/2M points. It started with a 1/4M ships tracks, and combining look-up tables from four maritime agencies they yield numeric wind force and direction...

Dynamic maps final (for now)

[Update1: longhand version posted on my map catalog blog
Update 2: companion Slideshare delves into technical issues]

This is the end installment of progressing from static to dynamic maps online. A few lessons learned along the way on posting a quarter million point dataset, which ballooned to almost half a million after links & joins...

Lessons from 'static to dynamic maps'

Last month related the stumbling blocks in posting too much data on arcgis.com - time animation pushed the limits of stock web service even when limits are set above 250K points - and other services don't offer animation as yet.

From static to dynamic maps, continued

Last month I reported on posting on arcgis.com some time-stamped, time-slider or time-aware maps - I showed my WhereIsAndrew map - I also mentioned how time-sliders are a great way to roll-up diverse datasets that are time dependent. CLIWOC Captain's ships logs was the other example cited, and I proceeded to post it as a service from ArcMap on arcgis.com.

From static to dynamic maps, my travel so far

I tell people "I know just enough java to be dangerous", and it has served my well in my prior attempts logged in my old web page. These were all Google Maps API v.2 I built about 5 years ago. This blog as well as my new map catalog showed how I built maps in QGIS then ArcGIS, and then posted them on giscloud.com and AWS via Mapcentia GeoCloud2. I recently posted maps on arcgis.com on desktop and smartphone, static results of 'traveling salesman' geoprocessing on the desktop or online.

Global Sailings (1662 - 1856, English, Spanish, Dutch, French) revisited

[Update: climate data (wind speed & direction) have now been added in short & long posts]

I originally extracted CLIWOC (CLImatological database for the World's OCeans) ship captains' logs ships locations over a decade ago, to demonstrate the processing of 250K+ points in ArcGIS desktop using then new File Geodatabase. Five years later I posted this on my old website with instructions how to use it in  old ArcGIS Explorer and KML, and then I put a layer package on arcgis.com - both related historic details like de laPerouse's demise below, the importance of data standards and metadata, and the interst it generated elsewhere - more recently I posted a time-based variation of same, where using a time slider helps clarifiy complex data on desktop GIS.

More on time-based GIS

Time-lapse GIS helps clear the clutter of a quarter million points of ship sailings from captain's logs from 1662 to 1855 re-posted last week. As an at-home project I previously split the data into arbitrary half-century time slices to better visualise it all. But that interfered with seeing trends across the span of data.

Baaack in the arcgis.com

[rhymes with: Baaack in the USSR] After a brief hiatus trying my hand outside ESRI, I'm baaack... posting maps on arcgis.com. Daniel Schobler from ESRI(DE) Schools Program kindly reposted and time-enabled my Global sailings, captains ships logs 1750 - 1850 into his Explorations and voyages 1662-1855 (time-enabled)

"The proof of the pudding is in the making"

The FOSS4G conference early this month in Barcelona raised a host of issues as usual. One picked up by James Fee and Jo Cook's blogs among others, is the role of SpatialLite in particular and exchange file formats in general? My main takeway is Jim's point, that while file exchange formats are important, efforts should be focused on internet exchange formats. We all agree that it's usage eventually that will dictate future formats, rather than vendors or standards bodies...

The Joy of (con)Text

It's a common geo-rant (thanks AGI'09) that metadata cause alternatively boredom or angst among geo-geeks - why? because we know our data, our professional audience does too, but our wider audience does not. In other words, if we don't write metadata, no-one else will understand the context later on. I found a clear example, when I mapped Captain Cook's ships logs a while ago, and posted on ArcGIS Online beta:

New home on the web

My original posts are still here, and my professional website is here.

By way of introduction, here are my original web maps:

• ArcGIS Explorer posting of CLIWOC data (ship tracks, 1750 - 1850), also on ESRI ArcGIS Online beta website
  [Jul.2011: transposed now on new arcgis.com]
• OpenLayers NRCAN web mapping services, Atlas and Polar
• Google Maps WhereamI complete with Google Earth insert
• Google Maps WherewasI with links to original text listings