Debris from Japanese tsunami steadily drifting toward California

This item got heavy news rotation this morning: the considerable debris from the tsunami in Japan is out to sea and slowly moving toward Hawaii and the west coast of the US. 

The debris is moving east at roughly 10 miles a day, and is spread over an area about 350 miles wide and 1,300 miles long -- an area roughly the size of California. It should reach beaches and coastal cities in California, Oregon and Washington in 2013 or early 2014. These estimates are from a computer model, the details of which are spotty in the articles I read. Example here from insidebayarea.

Debris movement similation: purple is low density, red is high density of debrisThere is considerable concern about this.  Last Monday, representatives from the Coast Guard, NOAA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. State Department and other agencies met for the first time in Honolulu to share information about the Japanese debris and begin to chart a strategy.

Among their plans: to notify the U.S. Navy and commercial shipping companies that regularly sail across the Pacific so they can begin to document what is floating. That could lead to expeditions to go map and study it.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a Seattle oceanographer who has studied marine debris for more than 20 years (and done some neat work with rubber duckies to map ocean currents) is one of the leads interviewed for the report.

Sacramento - vulnerable to levee breaks

Sacramento's levee system: levees are in orange, the inset is the capital under floodwaters.A good article from NYTimes discussing the vulnerability of Sacramento to levee breaks. Scientists consider Sacramento — which sits at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers and near the delta — the most flood-prone city in the nation. The city is at risk from earthquake-damaged levees and storm related flooding.

Cal-adapt goes live: making California climate change data available to all

California - 2090 - Annual Average Temperature - High EmissionsThe exciting project the GIF staff have been working on for 9 months is ready to be revealed. Cal-Adapt is a web-based climate adaptation planning tool that will help local governments respond to climate change. The site was developed by UC Berkeley’s Geospatial Innovation Facility with funding and oversight from the California Energy Commission’s Public Interest Energy Research Program. The information for Cal-Adapt was gathered from California’s scientific community and represents the most current data available.

“Cal-Adapt will allow people to identify climate change risks in specific areas around the state.” said Secretary for Natural Resources, John Laird. “This tool will be especially beneficial to government agencies and city and county planners, as they will now have access to climate change information in a very user-friendly application.”

UC Berkeley press release.

ESRI's ChangeMatters and New Landsat Image Services

Yesterday at the annual ASPRS conference in Milwaukee, WI (yes there were sausages shaped like the state), Jack Dangermond announced the release of ChangeMatters, and new Landsat Image Services from ESRI.

ChangeMatters. Working with partners, ESRI developed this web application - ChangeMatters - which allows users throughout the globe to quickly view the GLS Landsat imagery both multi-spectrally (in different Landsat band combinations) and multi-temporally (across epochs), and to conduct simple change detection analysis.

Image Services, with examples of vegetation, false color, land-water band combinations in seamless, color matched Landsat mosaics. Downloads will be available soon. Pretty nice. Website.

Example from ChangeMatters: Las Vegas from 1975 - 2000. Green is increase and red decrease in veg

Growth in geospatial jobs & need for training

The market for geospatial technologies is growing at about 35% a year, studies suggest, and the geospatial industry as a whole is expected to add at least 330,000 jobs between 2008 and 2018, claims recent article in Directions Magazine.

Summary: In this article, Becky Shumate, GISP, discusses the definition of the GIS profession, as well as its potential growth. She cites the Geospatial Workforce Development Center's work, as well as the Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration's recently concluded study of the field's potential growth.

Of note: the Dept. of Labor's Employment and Training Administration (ETA) tagged Geospatial Technologies as a "High Growth Industry" in March of 2010. They estimated that the geospatial technology profession will experience a growth of over 330,000 geospatial professionals between 2008 and 2018. This growth figure would bring the number of geospatial professionals to just under 1.2 million and is supported by similar estimates by other geospatial organizations. As quoted by the Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA), "uses for geospatial technology are so widespread and diverse, the market is growing at an annual rate of almost 35 percent, with the commercial subsection of the market expanding at the rate of 100 percent each year. "

Here is the report: http://www.careeronestop.org/competencymodel/pyramid.aspx?GEO=Y

Google Earth Builder announced, GIS in the cloud

Google has officially unveiled Google Earth Builder, a new product aiming to allow users to store and analyze spatial data in the cloud.  There are many details of the service yet to be revealed, but it will definitely be interesting to see where this is heading...

New BAAMA Journal Published

Volume 5, Issue 1 - Spring 2011

BAAMA is pleased to announce The BAAMA Journal has been published in conjunction with Earth Day.  Special thanks to all our contributing authors and editors.  The BAAMA Journal is a publication that highlights Bay Area people and projects that use geospatial technologies.

IN THIS ISSUE:

• Building Virtual San Francisco: Growing Up With GIS
• DPW Uses LiDAR and a Custom Algorithm for Delineating Drainage Catchments and Hydrologic Modeling
• Preparing Historical Aerial Imagery of Southern California Deserts for use in LADWP's GIS
• Where in the Bay Area

London Mapping Festival: 18 months of all things maps + london. Sign me up.

The London Mapping Festival 2011 – 2012, or LMF for short, is an exciting and unique initiative being launched in June 2011 and will run through to December 2012. It sets out to promote greater awareness and understanding of how maps and digital geographic data are being created and used within the Capital.   Through a diverse range of activities LMF will engage with a wide audience of mapping enthusiasts whether they are professionals, enthusiasts or others. We should do something like this for the SF Bay Area. More here.

A personal note: "Berkeley class recalls integration 41 years later"

The only tenuous connection to mapping in this story is that it was in Mrs. Room's class I first fell in love with maps. She had us do an elaborate field mapping project in the school's gardens with hula hoops and such, in kindergarten. One day I will find the result and scan it.

This article from SF Chronicle is about our recent reunion at John Muir School in Berkeley.

Forty-one years ago, in the early days of forced integration, a small group of Berkeley schoolchildren were placed in an experimental class and held together from kindergarten through third grade with the same teacher. On Sunday, they came back to see each other again - and to reminisce about what they saw as an idyllic time. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/10/BAP91ITSUD.DTL#ixzz1JFTvtD7e

tsunami animation from noaa

From Mark. Animation of the tsunami moving across the Pacific, from noaa.