Mile-by-mile map along the path of totality

On April 8, 2024, the moon is going to completely block the sun along a designated path. For the Washington Post, Dylan Moriarty and Kevin Schaul use a strip of satellite imagery to show the totality across the United States, with events and time along the way.

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Using satellite imagery to assess the damage in Ukraine

The Economist combined two satellite imagery sources, one that estimates fire events and one that estimates building damage, to assess the extent of damage in Ukraine:

Both approaches have weaknesses. NASA’s firms cannot see through cloud cover, a particular problem in winter. sar can pick up damage even through clouds, but is much less sensitive to changes outside of urban areas. But by combining the two datasets, we can form a fuller picture of the war. Our study shows that rather than being limited to a few big offensives and grinding battles, the war has left a brutal mark on large swathes of Ukraine. Fighting has reached 14% of municipalities, and damaged nearly half the built-up area in the hardest-hit cities.

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$300b World Cup seen through satellite imagery

Qatar spent $300 billion with a ‘b’ over the past twelve years to host the World Cup. For Bloomberg, Simone Foxman, Adveith Nair, and Sam Dodge show what that money went towards through satellite imagery. The shift is striking with a transition from desert flat land to stadiums and high rises over a short period of time.

These before-and-after satellite imagery pieces usually go the opposite direction, like after a natural disaster. So the sudden shift from nothing to a whole lot more is jaw-dropping.

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Wildfires and floods, a geographic before and after

In 2021, a large portion of North America was stuck in a heat dome with record temperatures and wildfires. Gordon Logie for Sparkgeo mapped the before-and-after of major wildfires during the year in British Columbia, with a combination of satellite imagery, photos, and scrolling. Logie then shows major floods, which are not necessarily caused by the fires, but are highly correlated.

The transitions for the before-and-after show the wildfire damage clearly. Instead of using the slider format, which kind of uncovers an after image, you can see the already boundaried regions change right away.

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Scale of Ukrainian cities

When you look inside the cities around the world, you will often find familiarity to where you live. For The Washington Post, Bonnie Berkowitz, Dylan Moriarty and Hannah Dormido look for the familiarity in the attacked cities in Ukraine. With side-by-side comparisons to U.S. cities, Ukraine feels less distant.

See also Scale-a-Tron, which lets you compare the scale of anywhere in the world against anywhere else in the world.

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Scale of the Tonga eruption

Manas Sharma and Simon Scarr used satellite imagery to show the scale of the Tonga eruption, which spurted a 24-mile cloud that grew to 400 miles in diameter in an hour. Notice the little Manhattan in the bottom left corner in the image above.

However, instead of leaving it at that, Sharma and Scarr animated the eruption over familiar geographic areas to better see how big it was. The cloud was big enough to cover whole countries.

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Sand mining viewed from above

Poyang Lake is China’s largest freshwater lake, but sand mining has changed its depth and structure, which messes up the ecosystem. Simon Scarr and Manas Sharma for Reuters used satellite imagery to show the scale and disruption of the mining activities.

The ships look like little bugs slowly eating away at the coastline.

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Average color of geographic areas

Based on satellite imagery, Erin Davis found the average color of places around the world. The above is by county in the United States, but Davis also made maps by country, which are a mix of greens, browns, and yellows.

See also the NYT piece from 2020, which framed color by political leaning.

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Satellite imagery at a cute angle

Maybe you remember the SimCity-like views through satellite imagery from a few of years ago. Robert Simmon from Planet Labs returns to the topic discussing practical use cases and advantages over a top-down view:

Satellite imagery surrounds us — from Google Maps and daily weather forecasts to the graphics illustrating news stories — but almost all of it is from a map-like, top-down perspective. This view allows satellite data to be analyzed over time and compared with other sources of data. Unfortunately, it’s also a distorted perspective. Lacking many of the cues we use to interpret the world around us, top-down satellite imagery (often called nadir imagery in remote sensing jargon) appears unnaturally flat. It’s a view that is disconnected from our everyday experience.

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Red-blue electoral map and the green-gray in satellite imagery

For NYT’s The Upshot, Tim Wallace and Krishna Karra looked at how the red-blue electoral map relates to the green and gray color spectrum in satellite imagery:

The pattern we observe here is consistent with the urban-rural divide we’re accustomed to seeing on traditional maps of election results. What spans the divide — the suburbs represented by transition colors — can be crucial to winning elections. It’s part of why President Trump, seeking to appeal to swing voters, has portrayed the suburbs as under siege and menaced by crime. But the suburbs are neither politically nor geographically monolithic. They are where Democratic and Republican voters meet and overlap, in a variety of ways.

The breakdown and process are impressive. Be sure to check out the full rundown. Wallace also provides more details about how this came together on the Twitter.

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