The Environmental Maps of the Week

Last year the Cartography and Geovisualization Group at Oregon State University created an amazing interactive map from NASA's video of A Year In The Life Of Earth’s CO2.

The group's Interactive Map of A Year In The Life Of Earth's CO2 wraps an HTML5 version of NASA's narrated video of a year's Carbon Monoxide and Carbon Dioxide concentrations around an interactive globe. This mean that you can zoom in and out and pan the video just as you could an interactive globe.

Greg Tatum has now created a three.js powered interactive globe using the same narrated NASA video, Earth's CO2 overlays the narrated video on top of a three dimensional model of the Earth. As the video plays you can rotate the globe and use your mouse-wheel to zoom in and out.

Earth's CO2 requires a web browser that supports WebGL.


EarthEnv's Global 1-km Cloud Cover interactive map visualizes 15 years worth of cloud observation at 1 km resolution. Using the map you can select any month of the year to see how much cloud cover a location normally experiences based on the last fifteen years.

The map's primary purpose is to explore different habitat types. The map provides a very good model for observing different biomes and eco-systems based on the frequency and dates of cloud cover. The map is therefore being used to predict species distributions based on the habitats and eco-systems revealed by the cloud cover data.


A new interactive map from NGIS allows Australians to see how a rise in sea levels could effect their neighborhoods. Coastal Risk Australia visualizes the predicted sea level rise for 2100 and also allows users to simulate different levels of sea level rise on a map of Australia.

You can use the search facility to center the map on any Australian location. The initial 'Predicted' map view shows the effect of predicted sea level rises for the year 2100. If you switch to the 'Manual' view you can use the map slide control to manually adjust the level of sea level rise and see the results automatically update on the map.