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.

ecoresearch writes "At this year’s JavaOne conference in San Francisco, NASA developers showed that virtual globes are not only suited to explore geographic maps, but can also serve as rendering engines for other types of imagery. Tom Gaskins, who leads the NASA World Wind engineering team, demonstrated the first public Knowledge Planet prototype, a Java applet developed by the Austrian IDIOM Research Project that visualizes large document collections using a landscape metaphor. The peaks of the virtual landscape indicate abundant coverage on a particular topic, whereas valleys and oceans represent sparsely populated parts of the information space. The applet draws upon the extensive news archive of the Media Watch on Climate Change, which provides a continuously updated account of media coverage on climate change and related issues." Some related stories below.

Via personal email, I've been introduced to the Climate Change Scenarios GIS data portal. From the website: "Welcome to NCAR's GIS Initiative Climate Change Scenarios GIS data portal. This portal is intended to serve a community of GIS users interested in climate change. The free datasets of climate change projections can be viewed on-line and/or downloaded in a common GIS (shapefile) or text file format. Many 2D variables from modeled projected climate are available for the atmosphere and land surface. These climate change projections were generated by the NCAR Community Climate System Model, or CCSM, for the 4th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." See also related stories below.

Roger the Shrubber writes "Hi there, Many years back — 1990 to be exact — I used the then cool TYDAC SPANS to model temperature upon a DEM based upon contour slope and aspect maps. The model was extremely simple but I sat on it for years until the recent weather made me think — is climate change finally here? The model we developed at University of Wales in Bangor was to map arctic alpine plants in Snowdonia in Wales and how they might disappear over the years. The model starts very simply and I invite better minds than mine to refine it and make it a more sophisticated one. Shall I share it? Would anyone like to make it their baby and make it an open source thing? (acknowledging me only as its parents of course)" See also selected climated-related stories below, including the Climate Change Scenarios GIS Data Portal mentioned earlier this year.