Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Old Weather on Google Maps

Old Weather

This website has been developed to help scientists recover worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes.

The transcriptions also help to track the movements of these ships and the stories of the people on board. Old Weather uses Google Maps to show the voyage routes of each vessel in its database.

Old Weather takes the weather observations from the ships' log books and reconstruct fields of pressure, wind speed, weather, cloudiness, precipitation. This data is then used to help make better weather projections and predictions.

ProtectedPlanet.net

ProtectedPlanet.net is a Google Map showing all the worlds national parks, wilderness areas and world heritage sites. On ProtectedPlanet.net you can search in any language to find information about individual protected areas in any part of the world. The application is the new website of the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA), a joint initiative between IUCN and UNEP-WCMC.

The world's protected areas are shaded blue on the map. If you click on any of the thumbnail map markers you can then view photographs from Panoramio and Flickr and text descriptions from Wikipedia for your chosen area.

The Google Maps interfaces to ProtectedPlanet.net and Old Weather have been developed with the help of Vizzuality, the team behind the World Database on Marine Protected Areas and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility Google Maps.

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