Tuesday, May 03, 2016

The Wildly Inaccurate Map of Global Cooling


The Wildly Inaccurate Map of Global Cooling is, as the name suggests, a very inaccurate map of how the world might be affected by global cooling. It is hard to predict how the world will be affected by changes in average global temperatures. For obvious reasons a lot of modern day climate science is concentrated on exploring the possible effects of a rise in temperatures on Earth.

The reason I created the map was to explore the setPaintProperty function in Mapbox. The setPaintProperty function allows you to adjust the colors of layers in a Mapbox GL map in the browser. In the Wildly Inaccurate Map of Global cooling I have used the setPaintProperty to change the colors of the water and landcover layers of the basemap as the user adjusts the global temperature slide control.

When the slide control is moved the colors change on the map layers across the whole world. Obviously changes to the Earth caused by global temperature changes would not be so uniform. The changes would be different across the planet depending on degrees of latitude, micro-climates and elevation.

One way I could improve this map would be to add a digital elevation model to the map. I could then change the colors on the map according to levels of elevation.

In its present form the map should be seen as a demo of the setPaintProperty in Mapbox GL. You should view the changing colors and the climate information on this map with a huge degree of skepticism.

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