Visualization Theater

How much water is in America’s rivers, and where is it? Perhaps unsurprisingly, people have little sense of how their local water resources compare in size to others. 'Is that a big river? A little river?” Now, thanks to the Pacific Institute, it is possible to visualize the nation’s water resources in different ways.

The Coastal Risk Screening Tool enables users to explore sea level rise and coastal flood risk over time, for anywhere in the world, and under multiple pollution scenarios. The maps allow users to choose between leading sea level rise models and to incorporate the most accurate elevation data available

The Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS), jointly developed by the European Commission and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), is a global hydrological forecast and monitoring system independent of administrative and political boundaries.

Information from the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) provides real-time data from offshore IOOS buoys, acting as an early warning system for shellfish hatcheries. They are our eyes on the ocean, coasts and Great Lakes. These data signal the approach of cold, acidified seawater one to two days before it arrives in sensitive coastal waters where larvae are cultivated. IOOS is an integrated network of people and technology gathering observing data and developing tracking and predictive tools to benefit the economy, the environment, and public safety at home, across the nation, and around the globe.

This tool from NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) provides the capability to interactively browse global, full-resolution satellite imagery and then download the underlying data, including data from the Global Precipitation Measurement Missions. Many of the 600+ available products are updated within three hours of observation, essentially showing the entire Earth as it looks "right now". This supports time-critical application areas such as wildfire management, air quality measurements, and flood monitoring. Arctic and Antarctic views of several products are also available for a "full globe" perspective. Browsing on tablet and smartphone devices is generally supported for mobile access to the imagery.

Use this web-mapping tool to visualize community-level impacts from coastal flooding or sea level rise (up to 10 feet above average high tides.) Learn about data and methods through documentation; share maps; view photo simulations of how future flooding might impact local landmarks; find data related to water depth, connectivity, flood frequency, socio-economic vulnerability, wetland loss and migration, and mapping confidence.

This web site contains a comprehensive review of the surface circulation of Earth’s ocean and classroom investigations appropriate for various disciplines at the high school level.

Access high-resolution ocean data sets from Saildrone Data Explorer, designed to make Saildrone data easy to find, download, and use for scientific and educational purposes. Saildrone’s global fleet of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) has traveled more than 500,000 nautical miles in the Arctic, the Antarctic, across the Atlantic and the Pacific, and in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, and North Seas. Each vehicle is equipped with a suite of science-grade sensors to measure nearly two dozen variables above and below the sea surface every minute. The result is a series of large-scale data sets describing many parts of the world ocean that have never been observed in such detail.

(Google animates 315 years of ocean data)
The International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS) is the most complete collection of surface marine data in existence, consisting of a digital database of 261 million weather observations made by ships, weather ships, and weather buoys spanning the years 1662 to 2007. These data have now been animated by Google Maps developers Paul Saxman and Brendan Kenny in a stunning visualization.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has a fantastic interactive map of American rivers. Click any river or stream and it will highlight the entire length of it, from the source to the mouth along with its tributaries. Follow the water.

Streamer is a great way to visualize and understand water flow across America. With Streamer, users can explore our Nation's major streams by tracing upstream to the source or downstream to where they empty. Streamer can also create reports about specific stream traces and the places they pass through.

This COSEE NOW community blog offers a compilation of some of the top sites on ocean, climate, and environmental data and science with excellent visual displays of data. This image represents the gradient of sea surface temperature (SST) at each point, and is based off of a 7-day composite of SST collected by the AVHRR instrument on NOAA’s polar orbiting satellites.

Public opinion about global warming is an important influence on policy and political decision making to reduce global warming and to prepare for climate impacts. The Yale Program on Climate Communication team of scientists has developed a geographic and statistical model to downscale national public opinion results to the state, congressional district, and county levels. These visualizations estimate public opinion across the country and offer a rich picture of the diversity of Americans’ beliefs, attitudes, and policy support. Maps are based on data through the year 2016.