Fort McMurray (Canada) Wildfires Social Map

[20/05/2016 update: noticed the dearth of social feeds? People are busy fleeing the area!
Also come back often as, sadly, fires that receded last week were returning this week...]

The wildfires around Fort Mc Murray in NE Alberta of W Canada were well covered in the press. Their origin is introduced in the splash screen below, which includes a broader context in the NASA brief. A modified pre-existing DIY Weathermap for Kuwait, especially the wind information, added info for Fort McMurray and MODIS data, whose hotspots are indicative of fires. Features inspired by Esri Disaster Response maps were finally styled with social feeds below. Twitter feeds for #YMM (airport code), #YMMfire and #YMMhelps were added to Flickr, Instagram and Youtube for the previous 5 days.

More maps R us

Continuing the ongoing (re)discovery of cool maps for the rest of us, here are two I found on Facebook from my friends Christophe Staff in Belgium and Aidos Malybayev in Kazakhstan.

5 Ws for citizens-as-sensors

Des Kilfoil at the CBC in Calgary, Canada introduced me 20-odd years ago to the 5Ws, the basic tenets of any investigative reporting, from journalists to police, from Wikipedia:

• Who? Who was involved?
• What? What happened (what's the story)?
• Where? Where did it take place?
• When? When did it take place?
• Why? Why did it happen?
• How? How did it happen?

Sat-nav stories

They say your mapping is only as good as your data. I experienced this fist-hand on my summer holidays this year. [Some of my Flickr! photos is posted on a Yahoo! personal map].