Santa's Big Adventure Tracker

🎅 Santa’s Big Adventure: Follow Him Around the World! 🌍

It’s Christmas Eve—the most magical night of the year—and guess what? Santa is already zooming around the world, delivering gifts to kids just like YOU! 🎁 This year, you can join in the fun and track Santa’s incredible journey using some super cool Santa Trackers! 🎄✨

🌟 The Snow-Globe Santa Tracker 🌟

Imagine this: a magical snow-globe with a 3D map inside. That’s the Mapbox Santa Tracker! You can shake it to make it snow (so fun! ❄️), and as Santa zooms from country to country, the map shows exactly where he is. You’ll see:

• How far Santa has traveled 🚀
• How many presents he’s delivered 🎁 (millions!)
• How many cookies he’s gobbled up 🍪 (he loves them!)

Every time you check, it feels like Santa is waving “hello” from somewhere new!

🦌 NORAD Santa Tracker: Powered by Rudolph’s Nose

Do you know how NORAD tracks Santa? With the heat from Rudolph’s shiny red nose! 🦌💡 Their super-smart satellites follow Santa’s sleigh as it soars through the sky. While you watch Santa on NORAD’s special map, you can also sing along to cheerful Christmas songs. 🎶 It’s like a holiday dance party and a Santa-spotting adventure all in one! Follow Santa tonight with the Official NORAD Santa Tracker!

🗺️ Google Santa Tracker: Countdown to Your Chimney!

The Google Santa Tracker is powered by something amazing called the Gnome Positioning System (GPS)—yes, gnomes are helping Santa! 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♀️ As Santa flies from rooftop to rooftop, you can see exactly where he is on a real-time map. There’s even a sleigh dashboard that shows:

• How many presents Santa has delivered 🎁
• Where he’s heading next 🌟
• How soon he’ll arrive at YOUR house 🕒

Isn’t that exciting? It’s like waiting for the best surprise ever!

Mapping Marine Traffic

Esri's interactive map U.S. Vessel Traffic offers a captivating visualization of activity on U.S. waterways, underscoring the vital role marine traffic plays in commerce, travel, and environmental management. Over the past decade, vessel traffic in the U.S. has seen significant growth, with annual cargo shipments reaching 2.3 billion tons.

Esri's interactive map leverages Automatic Identification System (AIS) data to track and categorize various vessel types, including cargo, fishing, passenger, military, pleasure, and tanker traffic. Users can zoom into specific ports or regions to observe dense, bright tracks that illustrate common routes and congestion points. The map’s design is both visually striking and highly functional, featuring neon-colored ship tracks against a dark basemap to emphasize movement patterns. 

Customizable filters for vessel type and time period allow users to tailor their view, enabling trend analysis from 2015 to the present. Furthermore, the ability to download ship track data based on geographic and temporal parameters enhances the map's utility for marine researchers and planners.

For a broader perspective MarineTraffic offers a global live map of major shipping lanes. The MarineTraffic tracking map includes an option to overlay a density map, which displays accumulated data on global shipping traffic over recent years. Activating the 'Density Maps' overlay reveals fascinating insights into the world's shipping activity.

Interestingly, gaps in the marine traffic density map can be just as informative as the recorded tracks. These voids may reflect global geopolitical influences (such as military conflicts), piracy threats, or localized shipping conditions.

Another remarkable tool for exploring global shipping routes is Shipmap.org, an animated interactive map that visualizes the movements of the global merchant fleet over the course of a year. Using AIS shipping data from exactEarth, the map displays the movements of different cargo ship types throughout 2012.

Shipmap.org allows users to filter vessels by cargo type, offering a detailed look at various shipping patterns. The accompanying narrated tour highlights intriguing trends in the worldwide merchant shipping trade, making it a truly engaging resource for understanding the dynamics of global marine traffic.

The Taco Bell Interstate Map

If you insist on only eating at a Taco Bell while driving cross-country then you need Think Outside the Bun. Think Outside the Bus is an interactive map of Taco Bell locations across the United States. For Taco Bell enthusiasts, this map is an invaluable tool, showing which states, cities, and even interstates offer the best access to affordable Mexican-inspired cuisine.

The map uses the size of each U.S. interstate to reflect the number of Taco Bells located along each route. According to the developer (via Reddit) , “I did a 5-mile buffer to count the number of Taco Bells for each major interstate. The ones that are marked are the ones with the most in that analysis.” Based on this method, Interstates 10, 95, 75, and 5 have the highest concentration of Taco Bells within the 5-mile buffer zone (although the data might be more insightful if adjusted for interstate length to provide a distribution ratio).

The map's sidebar reveals that the three states with the most Taco Bell restaurants are California, Texas, and Florida. Wait a minute - I smell a conspiracy here. Coincidentally (or not), these are also the three most populous states in the U.S. It’s almost as if Taco Bell strategically locates their restaurants near where people actually live and eat. However, I'm not sure that population density alone explains why Houston has the most Taco Bells of any city (66) - which is a full third more than Las Vegas (44)*.

You may also like the U.S. Chain and Independent Restaurants map, by the Georgia Institute of Technology's Friendly Cities Lab, which shows the locations of over 700,000 restaurants across the country, organized by restaurant chain and by frequency. 

* - I asked ChatGPT:  'Houston is known for its sprawling geography, with low-density suburbs and a car-centric culture. This layout is ideal for fast-food establishments like Taco Bell, which often rely on drive-thru business and larger properties for their locations. The density and urban planning in other large cities, like New York or Los Angeles, may limit the number of drive-thru restaurants.'

Moon 2.0

NASA is planning a crewed Moon landing in 2027, while the China National Space Administration (CNSA) aims to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030. India, too, has announced plans to send a person to the Moon by 2040.

This renewed interest in our closest celestial neighbor suggests that the lunar surface will soon be home to even more human-made objects. Currently, nearly 1,000 items from Earth litter the Moon. The publication NZZ, in its feature The Fate of Human-Made Objects on the Moon, uses an interactive 3D Moon globe to map the debris left on the lunar surface since the dawn of space exploration. Ever since the Soviet Union's Luna 2 became the first man-made object to reach the Moon, items such as golf balls and even astronaut waste have been abandoned on the lunar surface. The NZZ interactive globe highlights the nearly 100 locations on the Moon where these human-made objects can be found.

The diversity of human artifacts on the Moon ranges from scientific equipment to personal mementos. The U.S. Apollo missions, for example, left behind objects as varied as lunar rovers and dollar bills. NASA even left the ashes of Gene Shoemaker, a prominent geologist, on the lunar surface. According to NZZ, there are now, in total, more than 200 tons of human-made debris on the Moon.

You can learn more about the Moon on Bartosz Ciechanowski's amazing Moon visualization. This informative article about the Moon includes a superb interactive 3D globe which shows the phases of the moon by date (controlled using a sliding date control).

Another interactive feature allows you to track the current position of the Moon in the sky. With two slide controls—one for adjusting the date and another for the hour of the day - you can explore how the Moon’s position changes over time. By sharing your location with the map, you can determine the Moon’s exact position in the night sky from your location at any given hour on any given date.

A series of visualizations further illustrate the Moon’s motion and the role of gravity in space. From Earth, the Moon appears to wobble slightly over time, a phenomenon explained through Ciechanowski's engaging animations. Additional illustrations delve into how gravity influences moving bodies, showing how the force of gravity depends on the masses of the objects and the distance between them.

Via: Webcurios

The Coldest Day of the Year

Did you know the coldest day of the year doesn’t arrive at the same time for everyone in the U.S.? While Groveland, California, is shivering through its chilliest day today, parts of the East Coast are still weeks away from their coldest temperatures. This is because the coldest day of the year, on average, occurs at least a month earlier on the western seaboard than on the eastern seaboard of the United States.

According to NOAA's Coldest Day of the Year interactive map, the farther west you are in the United States, the more likely it is that you have already experienced the coldest day of the year. The map is based on 30 years of temperature data and shows the average coldest day of the year at thousands of weather stations across the country. 

NOAA explains that in the eastern part of the United States, the "coldest day of the year is typically later ... thanks to cold air from snow-covered parts of Canada dipping down into the area."

Thanks, Canada!

If you want to know when the first snow of the year is most likely to fall, you can refer to NOAA's handy interactive First Snow Map. This map provides a nationwide guide to when you can expect the first snow of winter. It displays the date at your location when the chance of snow is at least 50%, based on historical weather records from 1981 to 2010.

Latitude and altitude play the biggest roles in determining when you are most likely to experience snow. On average, the farther north you are and the higher your altitude, the earlier you are likely to see snow.

An Earth Powered by the Sun

Australia's ABC has used data from TransitionZero to map out the astonishing growth in solar energy around the world. Using machine learning to analyze global satellite imagery, TransitionZero has discovered that solar farms now cover approximately 19,000 square kilometers of the Earth. And the number of solar installations is doubling every three years.

Using a 3D globe of the Earth, ABC has mapped out the world's solar farms to visualize where and how solar power is reshaping energy systems worldwide. In A Survey of the World's Solar Energy Boom you can explore for yourself the regions driving this revolution. 

China is leading the charge in solar power, installing more solar capacity in 2023 than the rest of the world combined, with vast arrays in the sparsely populated west and north. India follows closely, leveraging government subsidies to build mega-projects like the Khavda Renewable Energy Park, which will power over 16 million homes. Meanwhile, countries, such as Pakistan and Namibia, are rapidly embracing solar through grassroots initiatives and affordable imports from China.

Solar power’s meteoric rise can be attributed to a combination of technological innovation, economic scalability, and urgent climate goals. Advances like UNSW’s PERC technology have revolutionized solar efficiency, while mass production in China has driven down costs, making solar the cheapest form of electricity. 

Global solar capacity is now projected to provide 12% of all electricity in just three years time. By 2034, experts predict solar could account for nearly half of the world's power generation, underscoring its central role in the transition to a sustainable energy future.

The CEO Murder Map

For the past two weeks, the United States has been reeling from the shocking murder of Brian Thompson in New York. As a data scientist, my instinct is always to ask how data can help make sense of what, on the surface, appears to be a senseless act of violence.

To that end, I have created the CEO Murder Map, to identify potential geographical patterns in the murders of millionaire executives. The map includes an interactive timeline that allows users to filter CEO murders in the United States by year.

My murder map was partly inspired by the K-12 School Shooting Database's Interactive Map of School Shootings , which documents 2,973 shootings across the United States. Disturbingly, this year alone, school shootings have occurred, on average, almost every single day. It is almost a bigger problem than the murder of CEOs.

The tragic reality is that the shooting of young school children in the United States has become a near-daily occurrence. Yet, these events seldom receive the same sustained media attention as the death of a CEO. The American media appears far less concerned with understanding why school children are being shot daily in classrooms than with the loss of one multi-millionaire, which has prompted endless analysis and soul-searching. I hope my CEO Murder Map can help provide some much-needed perspective on the broader context of violence in corporate America.

The K-12 School Shooting Database was established in 2018 following the Parkland High School Shooting. It now contains data on nearly 3,000 school shootings in American schools, spanning from 1966 to 2024. The Interactive Map of School Shootings includes powerful filtering options, allowing users to explore data by year, number of fatalities, school level, and time period.

The WaterwayMap

The WaterwayMap is a visually beautiful interactive map that uses OpenStreetMap data to visualize the structure and flow of rivers around the world.

At its core, WaterwayMap utilizes the directional data of waterways recorded in OpenStreetMap (OSM). In OSM, waterways are represented as ways - ordered lists of nodes that indicate the sequence and direction of flow. WWM uses this directional information and calculates additional hydrological details to provide a comprehensive visualization of water systems.

Thanks to a recent update by Amanda McCann, the map's creator, the widths of rivers now represent cumulative stream lengths. This means that the width of a river segment on the map reflects the total cumulative length of all upstream waterways feeding into that segment. Thicker lines represent rivers with larger upstream networks, such as major rivers fed by extensive tributary systems.

The colors of the rivers indicate grouped waterways and are randomly assigned. These colors help users visually separate different river systems or watersheds on the map. Each color corresponds to a connected network of waterways, typically a river and its tributaries. This allows users to easily identify which rivers and streams belong to the same system.

You can also explore watersheds on the Global Watersheds interactive map. By clicking anywhere on the map, you can view a visualization of the upstream watersheds calculated from your selected location. The map enables you to quickly see the origin and destination of water at any point on Earth.

The screenshot above shows the vast 1 million km² watershed flowing from the Andes into the Solimões River in Brazil. To explore the world's largest watersheds, you can click downstream in the Amazon Basin (the world's largest watershed) or in the Mississippi River Watershed in the United States.

If you're interested in tracing the flow of a watercourse, you can select the 'downstream' option on the map. This will display the flow path of the selected river from your chosen location to the ocean. Other options allow you to download watershed data in geoJSON, shapefile, or KML formats.

Also See:

River Runner and River Runner Global - uses elevation and hydrology data to calculate and animate the probable ultimate journey of a drop of water from any location to the sea. 

Draw Your Neighborhood

DETROITography has released an innovative interactive map that allows Detroit residents to outline their neighborhoods based on their personal perceptions. The aim of the Detroit Neighborhoods Mapping Tool is 'to collectively map neighborhoods as an image of the city in maps and words'.

The tool starts with a blank base map, devoid of predefined neighborhood names or boundaries. Users are encouraged to draw their own interpretations of their local neighborhood. To assist with orientation, optional overlays such as the locations of schools, churches, and community groups can be toggled on.

Additionally, the tool provides a feature to view all user submissions. On this collective map, the drawn neighborhoods are displayed as overlapping colored polygons. Hovering over any area reveals insights into how the community perceives its boundaries, including the percentage of submissions identifying it as part of specific neighborhoods.

The Detroit Neighborhoods Mapping Tool inspired me to revisit my own interactive project, Where is Texas. This map functions similarly, asking users to draw their interpretation of the Texas border. After submitting their outline, users can view all other submissions as well as the actual Texas boundary, which is displayed in green for comparison.

If you’re interested in creating your own regional survey tool, you can clone my map on Glitch. To do this, simply "remix" the project and replace all references to "Texas" in the text with the location you want to survey. Additionally, you’ll need to either remove the Texas polygon from places.js or update it to reflect the new geographical area you’re focusing on.

The Real-Time GPS Spoofing Map

Airlines around the world are reporting an increase in GPS spoofing and jamming incidents. GPS spoofing involves deliberately transmitting false GPS signals to trick a GPS receiver into believing it is in the wrong location. This manipulation can lead to navigation errors and pose significant security risks.

GPS jamming, on the other hand, involves intentionally blocking or interfering with GPS signals using a device called a GPS jammer. These devices transmit radio signals on the same frequency as GPS satellites, disrupting the ability of GPS receivers to pick up the legitimate signals needed to function. A GPS device receiving a jammed signal becomes unable to determine its true location.

As expected, GPS spoofing and jamming are most often encountered in conflict zones. For instance, in 2022, Space reported that Russia was jamming GPS signals during its invasion of Ukraine. Additionally, since Finland and Norway joined NATO, the Baltic region has experienced a marked increase in GPS jamming, which is widely attributed to Russian activity.

SkAI Data Services' Live GPS Spoofing and Jamming Tracker Map is an interactive map that uses live ADS-B data from the OpenSky Network to detect spoofed aircraft positions and areas of GPS jamming in real-time across the globe. As shown in the screenshot at the top of this post, the map currently highlights high levels of GPS spoofing and jamming activity in the Eastern Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, and the Baltics.

Similarly, FlightRadar's GPS Jamming Map analyzes NIC (navigation integrity category) data to determine where in the world GPS signals are currently being jammed or experiencing interference. NIC is a metric used to determine the quality and the consistency of navigational data received by aircraft and this metric indicates the reliability of an aircraft's position data. FlightRadar uses the NIC values of planes around the world to determine where GPS jamming or interference is currently affecting GPS signals.