Apollo News Snippets – February 2016 - Apollo Mapping
Posted on February 2nd, 2016

Apollo News Snippets – February 2016

The NOAA map above shows the percentile departure from average temperatures for all of 2015. You can see record warmth across large parts of the globe with only record or below average cold over the North Atlantic Ocean.
  • This month was a double gut punch for the climate-change deniers out there as the NOAA global climate report for December 2015 confirms it as the hottest month ever and accordingly the hottest December ever in 136 years of records. But wait folks, that’s not it – the 2015 annual NOAA global climate report also confirms that 2015 was by far the hottest year on record! The December departure from average exceeded 1 degree Celsius for the first time in record keeping as well. Check out the facts for yourself – this is an important topic we all need to be aware of.
  • On February 10, 1863, Alanson Crane invented the fire extinguisher, and in honor of this momentous occasion (J) my Google search of the month was, “GIS and fire.” If you comb through the many hits you get, you might find this paper on forest fire risk mapping by Claudia Cáceres of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota. In this study, Cáceres uses a variety of layers, including land cover type, elevation and distance to roads, to assess fire risk in a traditional weighted overlay approach.
  • For this month’s review of city GIS websites, we stay on the East Coast traveling from Philadelphia to Rhode Island’s largest town, Providence. The landing page for the Providence GIS department definitely leaves a lot to be desired but it does have links to multiple resources. From this page, you can access a collection of PDF plat maps and then a collection of themed PDF maps. There are also some slick looking web maps you can access on general information, 2010 census data and city council zones, however with Google Chrome I did not have much success making the maps work. You are able to email the GIS team with custom data requests using the form here.

Brock Adam McCarty
Map Wizard
(720) 470-7988
brock@apollomapping.com

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