This follows on the previous post here of an ongoing series of maps created for outlets that aren't necessarily on the web - see label:revisit here and label:3D here - this is partly because I'm disengaging from socials; and that itself was partly because I had to let go of significant chunk of work on the internet for lack of resources (see §2 here). See my remaining web presence in the banner menu of the web view here.
My web presence
Wednesday, 15 October 2025
Monday, 24 March 2025
A conversation with AI (long read)
Update: a short read on Medium tells "the story behind the story" of American & French Revolutions.
Shakira YouTube channel posted this video #LMYNLWorldTourCDMX:
How a confusion between CDMX (Ciudad Mexico) and MCDX (1410 in Roman numerals) lead to a far-ranging AI chat thru culture, geography, career and climate activism. MSFT Copilot (here) transcript (Italics: me, regular: Copilot):
Wednesday, 5 February 2025
London Thames Barrier update
Update 1: here is the transcript of Hansen's latest "in plain English" (alt. here)
Update 2: here is the Climate Cultures article this map was used in, thanks Lola Perrin.
Update 3: here at the end is the relevance of this sort of effort in a broader context
Two weeks ago I recreated Sea Level Rise (SLR) and Risk of Flooding (RoF) maps for the lower Thames River near the Thames Barrier (blog) for a WhatsApp Group considering the future of its ageing infrastructure w.r.t. recent climate extremes. This week came a global and urgent update affecting Sea Level Rise, by James Hansen who sounded the alarm ~ 35 yrs ago (go to 1981 & 1988 in Medium): a paper incl. supplementary materials "Global Warming Has Accelerated" (Columbia) c/w companion webinar (Columbia).
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
London Thames Barrier revisited
Update 2: see renewed Sea-level Rise extents according to new information here
Update 1: see addition at bottom... thanks to our indefatigable London climate activists!
Further to my original blog post 3½ yrs. ago here, I was asked to share maps of the area surrounding the Thames Barrier (Wikipedia): A WhatsApp group considered the necessity for a second barrier under Climate Change that increases both flooding and sea level seasonal elevations.
Monday, 16 December 2024
Senegal delta sea level rise map
Five friends at Arts & Metiers engineering school in Paris took a ten month leave to sail around the North Atlantic: Lez'Arts Marins (here) sail south from Britanny past the Azores & Madeira to Senegal for a moth humanitarian aid project, west across to Martinique and northeast N of Scotland to Scandinavia and back.
Tuesday, 12 November 2024
Cumbria classic revisited, Appleby-in-Westmoreland
Almost four years ago, a story map here showed the Skelworth Fold area of the Lake District for a friend, using advanced mapping and Environment Agency digital elevation.
Saturday, 12 October 2024
Hurricanes, tornadoes and sea level rise
Update: see @ bottom example of a Cyclone (Wikipedia) as they're called in the So. Hemisphere.
Further to our explorations in AI here and to the previous post here, this is a 'conversation' with Copilot, Microsoft Bing's AI extension. Conversation means that you can daisy-chain questions without repeating them, either to extend or to zero in:
Friday, 23 August 2024
A return to my roots
Updates: mapping climate data from historic ships & global harmonization follow respectively here & here.
"You can get Andrew outa maps, but you can't get maps outa Andrew" quipped a GIS map friend when I left Kuwait a dozen years ago... Well after quitting socials, Esri(UK) graciously helped me recover my desktop app. While I lost my story maps and web maps content, I maintained a free dev account - story maps and maps&data - this was chiefly to preserve my Living Atlas content inspired by John Nelson.
Wednesday, 28 June 2023
Cottenham Open CIC rebooted
Community Engagement 1, ... 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 & 21
Friday, 19 November 2021
Satellite data help for local housing issue
The #30DayMapChallenge Day 23 challenge is "GHSL data", here is the section in the story map that will chronicle the map challenge when it's finished:
Global Human Settlement for Northstowe controversial development NW of Cambridge UK, monitoring housing probability (GHS-BUILT-S2, 2018) and housing footprint (GHSL-ESM, 2015) against Esri 2020 Land Cover map extract with OpenStreetMap detailed base-map. Various blended overlays 'bake' the layers into a screen pattern allowing to compare and contrast past built areas vs. currently probably built against submissions.
Tuesday, 28 September 2021
Return East Anglia Peatlands to being carbon sinks
Community Engagement 1, ... 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 & 20
[ Update 5: Community Interest Company re-engagement is here
Update 4: actual Fenlanders interviewed in this fab blog post
Update 3: peatland restoration by numbers, Indonesian example
Update 2: soil degradation and climate change masterclass, TEDtalk pointers
Update: added Why we should all be obsessed with Peatlands at the end of the story map below ]
No. 20! Isn't it fitting that chronicling East Anglia challenges & opportunities w.r.t. climate emergency - risk of flooding, sea level rise, vulnerability indices and now pandemic - uncovered the greatest opportunity yet: returning local peatlands from carbon emitters to original carbon sinks could dwarf any individual effort to mitigate CO2 emissions, currently the major driver of climate change.
Tuesday, 21 September 2021
Sea Level Rise Maps #reloaded
[ Update 2: at bottom is the comprehensive water web map that followed this...
Update 1: near the end of the story map, see how you can style your own DEM tiles ]
East Anglia Flood Defences Final showcased in a story map the entire flooding infrastructure framework for the region, both from rising sea levels and risk of flooding, complete w flood defence infrastructure.
Online discussions in the wake of the IPCC 2021 report broadened that scope back to an original posting almost two years ago Sea level rise models show ins&outs of climate change science. Here is that update expanding to England and NW Europe, wrapping in all the lessons learned along the way.
Tuesday, 10 August 2021
"With a little help from my friends", Part II
New how-to
Part I showed how a map of DEFRA open data can help situational awareness for a West Midlands XR event. Having done a sea level rise and risk of flooding map for the Thames River valley near London last year, I redid one now with the lessons learned in the interval. The previous Sea Level Rise map from Open Data was rather onerous: I streamlined the process to simply load free & open data with only GIS styling; the resulting Build your own can be replicated on other GIS with listed data sources.
Friday, 16 July 2021
Land cover to study East Anglia peatlands evolution
Monday, 21 June 2021
"With a little help from my friends"
[ Update: Part II re-uses this and improves the manual for a London area action ]
Part of our mandate at cottenham.info is to raise awareness around climate change issues in East Anglia. A key part is to quantify risks around flooding from land during increasingly variable weather, as well as to predict what sea level rise would look like over time from melting polar ice caps. That combines respectively excellent ground work by DEFRA - see their Future Fens twitter feed - and modelling against topography by Ordnance Survey and DEFRA. And timing of sea level rises is an emotional issue: to balance the reality of the risk with questions around time scales (see comment), will help raise awareness without unduly raising alarm.
Sunday, 16 May 2021
East Anglia Flood Defences Update
Community Engagement 1, ... 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 & 17
[ Update: the next blogpost extends this into a 3d interactive map wrapping up this 2 years study ]
This closes the trio of updates on sea level rise timelines and infrastructure based on newly available climate change data, since this project started two years ago.
Environment Agency's DEFRA not only manages a comprehensive Risk of Flooding for River and from Sea via ground observations and mapping, but it also manages all the infrastructure related to flood risks from the same.
Let's extend our ongoing mapping effort here to include AIMS Spatial Flood Defences (inc. standardised attributes):
Wednesday, 5 May 2021
East Anglia sea level rise infrastructure update
Community Engagement 1, ... 12, 13, 14, 15 & 16
[ Update 3: the next installment includes Environment Agency's flood defence data
Update 2: here is an update via Enviro. Agency's outreach twitter @FutureFens
Update 1: here is a story map augmenting the last two posts with live maps... enjoy! ]
Following on the previous timelines update focusing on Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combine Authority, this is an East Anglia-wide update based on Environment Agency (EA) Survey, Office for National Statistics (ONS) Geoportal and Ordnance Survey (OS) Open Zoomstack data.
Thursday, 29 October 2020
Flood preparedness in East Anglia as a Story map
[ Update: here is a final version for finer-grained subdivision of the same data ]
This is the third in a series of Story Maps after Sea Level Rise models in Cambridge, East Anglia and on Local Flooding in Cottenham immediately north. Full page here.
Monday, 19 October 2020
Another Story Map on local flooding this time
[ Update: the next blog post expands on building situational awareness for flood response in East Anglia ]
Following my second-last post on a story map about flooding and sea level rise in Cambridge, here is another one about surface effects of flooding in my home village just north of there. Enjoy!
Saturday, 26 September 2020
Sea Level Rise (cont.)... and a Story Map!
[ Update 3: see a follow-on story map next. on local flooding effects just north of there...
Update2: thanks to Esri(UK) and Esri folk who helped my return to 3D web mapping!
Update 1: check Sea Level Rise model affecting Central Cambridge area on YouTube ]
Let's wrap up Sea level rise web map, poster and pirate map: having started with a simple map of Cambridge University Colleges indicating how deeply they would be submerged in a sea level rise scenario, let's map the buildings in 3D and show how far raised sea levels would submerge them! But first let's start with a flood risk map and finish with a combination to help with situational awareness.