My web footprint

Let me highlight the importance of the recent topic of AI my Community Interest Company delved into and I used in various forms shared in the highlighted post. Open this blog's  desktop version here, look at the stats at its right... and you'll see why the curve below spikes at far right here!

click to enlarge, original here

I also added some landmarks with my first page here in 1986, my old website I kept some writing here (also personal portfolio on desktop blog header menu) and major topics in this blog in the graph. 

Please see also my:

• web history
• series on COVID
• and on sea level rise
• revisited topics and
• community engagement series (end) 

Thanks for visiting, and keep on readiing my ongoing post on AI above 👆

Reposting stories from original website

As I prepare to end this blog, let's follow on recent updates: 

Aug. '24: A return to my roots
Oct. '24: "Where in the world...", updated
Oct. '24: Global sea level rise revisited
Oct. '24: Northwest Passage Reloaded
Nov. '24: Cumbria classic revisited...
Dec. '24: Exhuming my thesis area... & Jan. '25: update
Jan. '25: London Thames Barrier... & Feb. '25: update
Feb. '25: Beechey Island update
Feb. '25: East Anglia Peatlands revisited

East Anglia Peatlands revisited

Update1: see clipped oroginal and working vector datasets posted as detailed at bottom.

Update 2: added DIY map-mapping workshops & notes to help citzen science

Update 3: here at the end is the relevance of this sort of effort in a broader context

As news abounds about Arctic Permafrost & Peatlands degrading faster than thought (Copilot), this may be a good time to bring back some Natural England and Environment Agency data under Open Government License (OGL, National Archives). The upshot is that returning peatlands to their original state is the biggest climate change mitigator in the UK detailed here & here: briefly, peatlands either degraded thru neglect or converted to farm land, not only shrinks & stops being floodwater catchment, but it converts carbon sinks through sphagnum moss into carbon emitters thru windborne dried peat. In other words, re-watering peatlands dwarf efforts from other mitigation of climate change (see sources at bottom).

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. 

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.

Global sea level rise revisited

Update: so follow-on here with definions and relationsips among these topics

I posted here 3 yrs. ago among a series of DIY map notes to encourage Citizen Science, how to use NOAA global digital elevation data to model sea level rise data on straight geometry. See also here for an explanation referring to East Anglia. Here is what it looks like from the DIY document:

Adventures in AR (augmented reality)

[ Update 2: see Mars in 3D web view here for the latest imagery from NASA / USGS

Update 1: see "Explore Mars with GIS", the app and the story HT @PhilipMielke ]

And now for something completely different... Lockdown gave me plenty of time to be armchair explorer, and my latest story map Mars revisited open with: 

As NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover prepares to land on the Red Planet, let's extend what started on #30DayMapCallenge Day 24 bonus images displaying tantalising pictures of what looked like solifluction and rock glaciers.

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?

GDPR revisited

I already wrote about GDPR from the perspective of helping users get started with using Mind Maps. The presentation wraps up with further help from LINQ I partnered with.

AGI #GeoCom16 twitter report

[Update: LinkedIn Pulse post inspired by this: A non-anthropomorphic robotic future]

The AGI’s Annual Conference was held at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS IBG) in London yesterday. Here is a report by way of my twitter feeds, most recent ones first, from #GeoCom16:

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.