The Tornado – Maps and Images

Earth Observatory: Severe Tornado Outbreak in the Southern United States

NASA’s Earth Observatory has satellite images and animations of the weather system that spawned so many tornadoes this week.

Google Maps’s collection of tornado maps and images. The Wall Street Journal’s map of storm reports. Another map of storm reports.

MSNBC’s tracking map showing the path of the weather system along which tornadoes bloomed. A New York Times map showing hour-by-hour tornado reports.

Satellite and aerial images from before and after the tornadoes: the New York Times’s interactive maps (with the clever slider); a gallery of images from Google.

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Woodward’s Wisconsin Map and the Shaded Relief Archive

Woodward's Wisconsin relief map Via Daniel Huffman comes word that David Woodward’s relief map of Wisconsin, first published in 1971, is now available for download on the Shaded Relief Archive. The archive, the brainchild of Tom Patterson, who previously gave us the Shaded Relief website (previously), and Bernhard Jenny, is a collection of scanned manually shaded relief maps — relief maps before computers came along.

Our dual goals are giving cartographers a stylish option to generic digital shaded relief — manual relief often provides a clearer picture of major terrain features, especially at small scales, as shown in this comparison. And scanning the best hand-drawn relief before it is permanently lost. We are in a race against time. Mapping organizations having now shifted to digital production are discarding photomechanical materials, including manual shaded relief. Much of this beautiful art deserves to be used by future mapmakers.

Some lovely stuff in there.

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Connecting Christchurch’s Earthquakes

Magnitude 6.3 Earthquake near Christchurch, NZ (Earth Observatory)

With this map, Earth Observatory connects the two major earthquakes to hit Christchurch, New Zealand:

This map shows the earthquakes that occurred near Christchurch since September 3, 2010. On that day a magnitude 7.1 quake struck to the west of Christchurch. Black circles represent earthquakes from September 3, 2010, until February 21, 2011. Red circles show the locations of the magnitude 6.3 quake and aftershocks on February 22 and the morning of February 23. Larger circles represent stronger earthquakes. Yellow shows urban areas, including Christchurch.

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New York Subway Map Quilt

Karyn's Whole Cloth Quilt

A whole cloth quilt based on a map of the New York subway system. Karyn’s used a diagrammatic map that confused me for a moment: since the map comes from the New York City Transit Authority, it dates from between 1953 and 1968 (pre-Vignelli, in other words), but diagrams of that sort were produced by Salomon in the 1950s, and Goldstein and D’Adamo in the 1960s, according to Mark Ovenden’s Transit Maps of the World. Via Rebecca Blood.

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