Anyone living in a major U.S. city for the past decade may have noticed a change in the air. The change is apparent in new NASA satellite images unveiled this week that demonstrate the reduction of air pollution across the country.
After ten years in orbit, the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) onNASA’s Aura satellitehas been in orbit sufficiently long to show that people in major U.S. cities are breathing less nitrogen dioxide – a yellow-brown gas that can cause respiratory problems.
Nitrogen dioxide pollution, averaged yearly from 2005-2011, has decreased across the United States.
Image Credit:
NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio/T. Schindler
Nitrogen dioxide is one of the six common pollutants regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to protect human health. Alone it can impact the respiratory system, but it also contributes to the formation of other pollutants including ground-level ozone and particulates, which also carry adverse health effects. The gas is produced primarily during the combustion of gasoline in vehicle engines and coal in power plants. It’s also a good proxy for the presence of air pollution in general.
Air pollution has decreased even though population and the number of cars on the roads have increased. The shift is the result of regulations, technology improvements and economic changes, scientists say.
Esri’sHurricane Public Information Mapis available for the media to embed or share as part of ongoing storm coverage. You can explore the storm’s projected path and live storm warnings from NOAA overlaid on geotagged social media from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Instagram.
Today Redfin (www.redfin.com), the customer-first real estate brokerage, released an infographic that connects each of the 31 non-U.S. countries participating in the 2014 World Cup with a U.S. city that has many residents who were born there. The graphic illustrates where there are likely to be pockets of people from other countries rooting for their home team.
For example, there are a number of people who were born in Belgium but currently live in Santa Barbara, so it’s likely there will be some lively banter going on there during today’s match between the U.S. and Belgium.
To generate the graphic, Redfin started with U.S. Census data for foreign-born residents across all metro areas in 2012, then narrowed it down to metro areas with at least 200,000 total residents and at least 100 residents born in the World Cup country. For the illustration, each city could only rank for one country. Otherwise, cities such as New York, Washington D.C. and Miami, which have large populations of foreign-born citizens, would dominate the map. For example, once Miami ranked for Colombia, it was not able to rank for any other countries, even though the city also has a lot of residents who were born in Argentina and Uruguay.
With 13 percent of the U.S. population born in another country, it’s easy to find excited fans cheering on almost every team participating in this global competition that happens only once every four years.
Redfin (www.redfin.com) is a customer-first real estate brokerage that represents people buying and selling homes. Founded and run by technologists, Redfin has a team of experienced, full-service real estate agents who are advocates, not salespeople, earning customer-satisfaction bonuses, not commissions. Redfin.com features all the broker-listed homes for sale, as well as for-sale-by-owner properties that don’t pay brokers a commission. Redfin also offers online tools that make the entire process of buying or selling a home easier and more fun. The company serves major markets across the U.S. and has closed more than $13 billion in home sales. In 2012, Redfin was named one of The DIGITAL 100: World’s Most Valuable Private Tech Companies by Business Insider.
June 19, 2014—MapLight, a nonpartisan research organization that tracks the influence of money in politics, announces the launch of an extensive mapping project examining the geographic origin of contributions to legislators by state; contributions from companies to legislators by state; and roll call votes by state and district on key bills in Congress. For the first time, it will be possible to instantly see and understand the role money from outside sources plays in local races and the geographic alignment of support and opposition to key legislative initiatives.
With Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) on his way out of Congress, the House Republican Caucus is working to replace him as Majority Leader, the second highest-ranking leadership position in the House of Representatives. According to House.gov, the Majority Leader "is charged with scheduling legislation for floor consideration; planning the daily, weekly, and annual legislative agendas; consulting with Members to gauge party sentiment; and, generally working to advance the goals of the majority party." The Majority Leader also plays a key role in raising funds to help their party retain majority control of the House.
House Republicans will meet today, Thursday, June 19, 2014, to vote on electing a new Majority Leader. Below is a geographical look at contributions by state to leading contender, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), from interest groups and individuals.
Click on the map above (or click here) for an interactive version where you can view McCarthy’s top donors in each state.
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Methodology: MapLight analysis of campaign contributions to Rep. Kevin McCarthy from the 2012 election cycle through the 2014 election cycle based on latest available data from the Federal Election Commission as of April 14, 2014.
MapLight Voting Map: Shows Roll Call Votes on Key Congressional Bills
After years of delay, Congress finally approved a new farm bill earlier this year, extending the nation’s food and agriculture programs until 2018. The bill passed on a bipartisan vote of 251-166, with conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats making up the bulk of the "No" votes.
Click the map below (or click here) to view an interactive version that shows how Representatives in each congressional district voted on the farm bill.
Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable television and internet provider, is one of the most politically active companies in American politics. They are currently seeking regulatory approval from the U.S. government to combine with Time Warner Cable, the second largest cable provider in the country.
The map below provides an overview of Comcast’s contributions to members of Congress. Click on the map (or click here) to view an interactive version where you can see the top recipients of Comcast money in each state.
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Methodology:MapLight analysis of campaign contributions to current members of Congress from PACs and employees of Comcast Corporation from the 2012 election cycle through the 2014 election cycle based on latest available data from the Federal Election Commission as of April 14, 2014.
The 2014 FIFA World Cup begins later this week in Brazil, and Esri has created a collection of interactive maps to enhance the perspective of the world’s largest sporting event.
2014 US World Cup Roster Explore the hometowns of the 23 men named to Team USA’s roster and learn more about their professional soccer experience. You can embed this map with the following code: World Cup Venues: From Dust to Dreams Take a closer look at the 12 stadiums hosting this year’s matches and compare the finished buildings to recent imagery taken during construction. You can embed this map with the following code: World Cup Dashboard Explore the country breakdowns for the eight World Cup groups and track live results as the tournament progresses through interactive widgets from FIFA. You can embed this map with the following code:
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas – As the Gulf Coast begins another hurricane season, researchers with the Conrad Blucher Institute for Surveying and Science (CBI) at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi will be improving the data collection system to allow for more accurate planning and predictions for flooding and sea level rise.
CBI has been awarded $1.35 million to enhance the National Spatial Reference System that helps model and predict sea level rise.
Forecasters are predicting a hurricane season with one or two major hurricanes, but flooding can still pose significant threat, especially to the vital infrastructure along the Gulf coast, which includes 10 of the 14 largest ports. The long-term stability of this region’s infrastructure is in question due to the impact of sea level rise and associated increases in risks of flooding. Growing Gulf coastal populations, up 32 percent from 1990 to 2008, compound the risks. Preparing for sea level rise, flooding and other impacts requires accurate data about what’s occurring at the water’s edge. Collection methods for this type of geospatial data will be enhanced through this project.
The funding, from the National Geodetic Survey, a project of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, provides the foundation for modeling along the northern Gulf of Mexico through the National Spatial Reference System.
The project focuses on an area that is most exposed to inundation from tropical storm surge and has a high risk of flooding and long-term effects of climate change and subsidence.
“We are excited to be part of this project to provide the latest geospatial data with information from tide gauges, sea level observations, land elevation reference points, and 3D positioning,” said Dr. Gary Jeffress, Director of CBI. “This system will help local and regional leaders plan for improved resilience to the impacts of sea level rise and flooding and develop long-term strategies to address impacts along the northern Gulf of Mexico.”
The project will extend and improve monitoring stations from Texas to the Florida Keys to provide additional measurements, including more accurate data regarding elevations, 3D positioning, subsidence rates and sea level observations, that will establish ongoing monitoring of the relative sea-level change along the northern Gulf of Mexico in the coming decades.
Dr. Jeffress, Dr. Ruizhi Chen and James Rizzo, with CBI and Texas Spatial Reference Center, will lead the project for A&M-Corpus Christi. Researchers from University of Southern Mississippi, Louisiana State University and Florida Atlantic University are also partners in the project.
About the College of Science and Engineering: The College of Science and Engineering is in the race for discovery with research programs such as the premier Geographic Information Science (GIS) program in the country through the College’s Conrad Blucher Institute, the innovative Plasma Engineering Research Lab, and a nationally-certified Information Insurance in Computer Science. As one of the foremost institutions for coastal, marine, and environmental research, the College offers two doctoral degrees in these areas and is also home to the Center for Coastal Studies. Students and faculty in the College are affiliated with the University’s world-renowned Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies. From cyber-security to renewable energy, from underwater exploration to the development of unmanned aerial technologies, our commitment to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers is unparalleled.
About Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi: Offering more than 60 of the most popular degree programs in the state, Texas A&M-Corpus Christi has proudly provided a solid academic reputation, renowned faculty, and highly-rated degree programs since 1947. The Island University has earned its spot as a premier doctoral-granting institution, supporting two research institutes and 10 research centers and labs. Discover your island attamucc.edu.
The Internet is a big, big, big place. In the 200 seconds I watched the “Internet in real-time” infographic, Google ran almost a million searches and sucked up over $300,000 in revenue. Facebook users uploaded over a terabyte of data, liked something over 10.5 million times, and posted 11 million items.People watched 78,385 hours of Netflix content, and Android users downloaded over 250,000 apps. Amazon shoppers spent over a half a million dollars, and 690 million emails were sent.
Storm surges should be a top priority when it comes to tropical-storm preparedness, as the 2014 hurricane season outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration points out. This explanatory infographic from RMS, the leading catastrophe risk management firm, puts storm surges into perspective. This is particularly important for the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts, where much of the land is 10 feet or lower below sea level. NOAA itself announced a new storm-warning policy for this hurricane season to publicize its own storm-surge graphics and mapping.
About RMS
RMS technology enables the world to have a more complete view of catastrophic risk.
RMS is transforming the insurance industry’s understanding and quantification of risk with RMS(one)™, the industry’s only exposure and risk management platform. More than 400 insurers, reinsurers, trading companies and other financial institutions trust RMS models, analytics and metrics as reliable benchmarks for strategic risk pricing, management and transfer.
Founded at Stanford University, RMS is celebrating 25 years of innovation in catastrophe risk management this year. Learn more at www.rms.com and follow us @RMS.
The U.S. Geological Survey has released a set of maps depicting the distribution of selected chemical elements and minerals in soils across the country.
Understanding the composition of soil is important for a variety of reasons. Specialists in agriculture and food safety find soil data useful because soil is the source of most biologically active trace elements that reach humans through the food chain. Public health specialists need to understand soil pathways for human exposure to potentially toxic elements. Regulators and resource managers use soil data to identify contamination, assess the risks to ecosystems and human health from contamination, and to set remediation goals. The maps and data sets serve as a starting point for future research in a variety of fields.
Sample map: Note higher lead levels in the northeastern U.S.
Why Soils?
Soils play a key role for the Earth’s life support system in a number of ways such as determining human health and ecosystem integrity. They are required for supporting food production and needed for water storage and groundwater recharge. Soils are critical in the natural cycling of carbon and essential nutrients.
According to Dave Smith, the USGS scientist who led this project, “These data and maps are not designed to provide detailed soil information about what might be in your backyard. Rather they put your backyard into a national context so you can know the general range of element concentrations that are in soils from your part of the country.”
This USGS project delineates national-scale patterns and variations in elemental composition for soils. This new study provides a more complete understanding of natural variability for the nation’s soils than has ever been available.
The Details are in the Dirt
To produce the maps, about 40 people collected thousands of soil samples from more than 4,800 sites throughout the conterminous U.S. from 2007 to 2010. For each site, they collected three samples from the surface down to about three feet. In total, scientists analyzed more than 14,000 soil samples for 45 elements and nearly 10,000 samples for major minerals.
Locations of more than 4,800 sites where crews collected soil samples.
The USGS data sets for soil geochemistry and mineralogy provide a baseline for the amount and distribution of chemical elements and minerals against which scientists can measure future changes from natural processes or human activities.
Humans dispose of unwanted wastes from households, agricultural operations, and industrial processes into soil. It is not possible to recognize and quantify the effect of human activities on soils without understanding natural variability.
Sourcing the Samples
It takes a lot more than just digging holes to gather soil from thousands of sites across the lower 48 states. In the nationwide sampling effort, the USGS enlisted help from state geological surveys, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, and 19 students from 12 universities who participated from 2008–2010. The sampling crews had flexibility at each site with the general guidance being that no samples be taken within 200 meters of a major highway, within 100 meters of a building or structure, within 50 meters of a rural road and no less than 5 kilometers downwind of any power plants or stack emitters.
Soil material from Delmarva Peninsula
Kevin Bamber was an undergraduate student at University of Missouri in 2008 when he signed on to help the USGS with the project for two summers. “I have been in and out of every rural part of Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Idaho and Montana,” he said.
Field crews not only learned about water retention for soils or that the magic depth for septic systems is three feet, they also interacted with a wide menagerie of property owners and animals.
Once they were in the field, crews had to contact the landowner and obtain permission to collect samples. Crews didn’t collect any samples from private land without first obtaining permission.
“The vast majority of landowners were happy to cooperate with our project. We could not have successfully completed this project without this cooperation,” said Smith.
Still, this wasn’t an easy task. “Knocking on doors and dealing with landowners was the hardest part of the job,” Bamber said. “A lot of times we had to explain the project. Most of the land is privately owned and I had to go as close as I could to the pre-selected target site. The responses were all over the place. It helped me develop interpersonal skills.”
Some of the property owners that the students encountered are unforgettable, Bamber said. “A woman and her brother in northeast Mississippi lived on a small lot with a few trailers. The woman said, ‘Don’t dig there because that’s where the dogs are buried’ and ‘there’s a snake pit in the woods.’”
Bamber also learned local folklore. “A guy in Louisiana said we could dig on his property because it was a full moon and that anytime you dig a hole when there’s a full moon, you always have more than enough dirt to fill the hole. We really picked the right day.”
Bamber examines soil sample
The back roads of Idaho would prove to be more treacherous. “I got stuck in a national forest for 12 hours,” Bamber admits sheepishly. “In 2009, it was a wet year. We got high-centered on the road and we were stuck at8:00at night. We called the Bonneville County sheriff and gave them coordinates but they were 15 miles away in the wrong direction. We slept in the truck. The next morning they showed up with a helicopter and pulled us out.”
Despite his ordeals, Bamber, currently pursuing a Master’s degree in soil science at Virginia Tech, says he has no regrets. “It was great, easily my best working experience ever. It’s really helped all around.”
Start with Science
Although soil is important, the body of knowledge about the concentration and spatial distribution of naturally occurring elements in the soils of North America is remarkably limited. Prior to the current study, the best national-scale data set for soil geochemistry was a USGS study in the 1960s and 1970s that used analytical methods that are now outdated and inappropriate for environmental studies. The results of this new effort provide the most precise estimate of the geochemical variability of the nation’s soils that has ever been available and open the door for to future research about a valuable natural resource.
