Slashgeo

The EOPortal has an article about the United Nations Montreal's Climate Change Conference and remote sensing projects. From the article's introduction: "As the future of Earth’s forests moved up the agenda at the United Nations Climate Change Conference - negotiating a post-Kyoto strategy to combat global warming - ESA and its national collaborators presented delegates with promising results from projects using satellites to identify wide-area forest retreat and expansion."

Pierre Marchand writes "Dear All, Here is a link to free and easy on-line access to 102 years of monthly climate data through either a webmap or direct input of coordinates. The coverage is global. http://dw.iwmi.org/dataplatform/ClickandPlot.aspx Please kindly pass the link around in the community to people you know could be interested. The rationale behind this service is to provide easy access to location specific climate queries – so that you don’t have to download the whole world’s coverage when you actually just need one or a few location(s) ;^) – for data rich countries there might be other local datasets that are prefered but for data poor countries this is a must. This service is part of IDIS, the water, food and environment data sharing portal. As indicated in the available metadata this dataset was made open to the public by the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, UK. Full credit and description is given in the metadata. Best regards, Pierre PS this service uses a popup and was designed to be used with MS Internet Explorer - we are aware there are issues with Firefox and Safari (Mac) – sincere apologies for this – cross-browser compliance is on top of our to-do list."

The Map Room links to a profile of Kirstin Dow, co-author of The Atlas of Climate Change. From the profile: "One of the goals that Dow and Downing had when creating the book, was to make it's contents accessible for everyone, as they feel it is information everyone should know. They've accomplished that through a combination of clear, concise writing and colorful, easy-to-comprehend graphic elements. Loaded with basic, yet effective maps and charts, as well as photographs, the book is a user-friendly reference guide, as well as an interesting and informative read." I own two copies of this atlas. The geographic content is not omnipresent nor detailed, but it is definitely worth the read: well designed, informative maps, great content and even cheap price. I recommend it.

The Free GeoTools blog details the FAO World Climate data freely available. From the blog: "The United Nations Food And Agriculture Organization (FAO), AgroMet division, has compiled a database of climatic information gathered between 1961 and 1990 from close to 30,000 observation stations. This database, and applications designed to extract, analyze and map the data, are available online."

The NASA Earth Observatory runs a long article names "An era of earth observations: looking back at 50 years". From the introduction: "Where will a developing hurricane make landfall? What is the status of the ozone layer? How much will sea level rise? No other single measurement platform has revolutionized the ability to address these and other fundamental Earth science questions as much as satellites orbiting the Earth. From weather forecasting to high-tech navigation systems to answering fundamental questions about the Earth’s climate, satellites have become a crucial part of a wide variety of scientific endeavors and practical applications over the past 50 years."

From the PPGIS.net blog web site : a Remote Sensing and GIS Conference on May 5 - 6 2008 will be held at Nusa Cendana University in Kupang, Indonesia. For more details, see this web page http://participatorygis.blogspot.com/2008/02/remote-sensing-and-gis-conference-may-5.html This is an advanced notice and call for presentations. It is proposed that presentations from the conference be published as proceedings. The organisers have currently identified the broad topics, such as: deforestation monitoring in Timor, community GIS and Participatory 3D Modeling (P3DM) and GIS for analysis of health and education data.