Waldo Canyon Fire Timelapse Video
This striking timelapse video packs five days of fire into fifteen minutes, letting viewers see the extent of the Waldo Canyon fire that began blazing in the Colorado Springs area on June 23, eventually burning into the city itself. Dubbed with dramatic music and news updates that correlate with onscreen action, the video is a dramatic visualization of the fires that have plagued the Southwest this year. As of Monday, the Waldo Canyon fire was 98 percent contained. With a total of nearly 350 homes burned and severe impacts on tourism, it’s considered the most destructive fire in Colorado history.
OnTheMap for Emergency Management
When there’s an emergency on your map, you might find this newly updated tool from the U.S. Census Bureau comes in handy. The customizable mapping interface allows users to access population and workforce statistics in real time for areas that are experiencing emergencies such as storms, floods, or wildfire. Other documents, such as presidential disaster declarations, are also linked.
Climate Change: Lines of Evidence
Getting a grasp on climate change—and how we came to an understanding of our role in it—can be daunting even for those with a background in the subject. Now, the National Research Council has released a video series that will make the twists and turns of current climate knowledge easier for the layperson to understand. Released late last month with a corresponding booklet, the series touches on topics such as solar influence, natural cycles, increased emissions, and greenhouse gases.
Climate Communication
While you’re studying up on climate change, you might as well take a gander at the Climate Communication website, a climate outreach project of the Aspen Global Change Institute. Climate Communication helps simplify those burning climate questions with an easy-to-navigate site that doles out plain-language answers to what’s happening to our climate, how it will affect us, and what we can do about it.
Storm Surge Viewer
This budding project provides mapped data for storm surges, high water marks, and storm paths using the unique storm surge database created by the Western Carolina University Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines. The viewer incorporates information from the database—expected to eventually become the central location for all storm surge and high water mark data—with NOAA storm track data to get a full picture of storm effects.