Global Data Hound

All about global data sets

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Release of 8 global datasets on Volcano and Landslide Hazards

July 26th, 2010 · TerraViva Data

Map of Central America showing frequency of volcano hazards on a 2.5 minute grid. This hazards map is based on data from the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) Volcano Database spanning the period of 1979 through 2000. Click image to enlarge.
Volcano hazard frequency map

We’ve added 8 new global datasets on volcano and landslide natural hazards to our TerraViva! GeoServer as part of our work with the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University. These releases come from a collaboration among the Center for Hazards and Risk Research (CHRR), International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank, the European Global Resource Information Database (GRID-Europe) of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and CIESIN. The links below take you to the metadata records for each of these datasets, where you can obtain more information and download them for use with our Global Data Viewer or Global Data Analyst tools. No password is required to access these datasets, they are freely available to all users.

Landslide Hazard Frequency 2006 (CHRR)
Landslide Mortality Risks 2006 (CHRR)
Landslide Proportional Loss Risk 2006 (CHRR)
Landslide Total Economic Loss Risk 2006 (CHRR)
Volcano Hazard Frequency 2006 (CHRR)
Volcano Mortality Risks 2006 (CHRR)
Volcano Proportional Risk 2006 (CHRR)
Volcano Total Economic Risk 2006 (CHRR)

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-25

July 25th, 2010 · Tweets-@isciences on Twitter

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8 new global datasets on flood and drought hazards released

July 19th, 2010 · TerraViva Data

Map showing a 2.5 minute grid of global flood mortality risks calculated over the 20 years between 1981 and 2000. Click image to enlarge.
Flood Mortality Risk

We’ve added 8 new global datasets on issues related to flood and drought natural hazards to our TerraViva! GeoServer as part of our work with the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University. These releases come from a collaboration among the Center for Hazards and Risk Research (CHRR), International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank, the European Global Resource Information Database (GRID-Europe) of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and CIESIN. The links below take you to the metadata records for each of these datasets, where you can obtain more information and download them for use with our Global Data Viewer or Global Data Analyst tools. No password is required to access these datasets, they are freely available to all users.

Drought Hazard Frequency 2006 (CHRR)
Drought Mortality Risks 2006 (CHRR)
Drought Proportional Loss Risk 2006 (CHRR)
Drought Total Economic Loss Risk 2006 (CHRR)
Flood Hazard Frequency 2006 (CHRR)
Flood Mortality Risks 2006 (CHRR)
Flood Proportional Loss Risk 2006 (CHRR)
Flood Total Economic Loss Risk 2006 (CHRR)

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-18

July 18th, 2010 · Tweets-@isciences on Twitter

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Release of 11 new global datasets on Earthquakes and Cyclones

July 14th, 2010 · TerraViva Data

Map showing the frequency of global earthquake events exceeding 4.5 on the Richter scale during the time period 1976 through 2002. Click image to enlarge.
Global Earthquake Frequency

We’ve added 11 new global datasets on issues related to earthquake and cyclone natural hazards to our TerraViva! GeoServer as part of our work with the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University. These releases come from either the European Global Resource Information Database (GRID-Europe) of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), or from a collaboration among the Center for Hazards and Risk Research (CHRR), International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank, UNEP/GRID-Europe, and CIESIN. The links below take you to the metadata records for each of these datasets, where you can obtain more information and download them for use with our Global Data Viewer or Global Data Analyst tools. No password is required to access these datasets, they are freely available to all users.

Cyclone Hazard Frequency 2006 (CHRR)
Cyclone Mortality Risks 2006 (CHRR)
Cyclone Proportional Loss Risk 2006 (CHRR)
Cyclone Total Economic Loss Risk 2006 (CHRR)
Earthquake Hazard – Peak 2006 (CHRR)
Earthquake Hazard Frequency 2006 (CHRR)
Earthquake Mortality Risks 2006 (CHRR)
Earthquake Proportional Loss Risk 2006 (CHRR)
Earthquake Total Economic Risk 2006 (CHRR)
Tropical Cyclone Frequency 1975-2007 (UNEP)
Tropical Cyclone Surge frequency 1975-2007 (UNEP)

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Mapping Humanity – Who are you and where do you live?

July 11th, 2010 · Data Chatter, TerraViva Data

AUTHOR: Richard C. Cicone, President, ISCIENCES, L.L.C.

Editor’s note: Today the international community observes World Population Day to bring attention to the importance of population issues. This year’s theme, “Everyone Counts,” is meant to emphasize how reliable, disaggregated data is crucial to progress and world development. To honor this theme, we asked ISciences’ president to comment on the importance of reliable population data in understanding the impact of humans on our planet.

Knowing where people are, who they are, how they live, and what they do is the domain of human geography and demography.  A well-worn Volume 20 of the People’s Encyclopedia, the Atlas, was testament to my youthful fascination with this topic as depicted through maps.  I could travel the world, learn of its bounty, and observe how Homo sapiens has tried to shape and master it.  The maps showed me how we organized ourselves into units and how we transformed the natural environment for our needs by farming it, mining it, forming settlements, playing on it.  Cities and roads formed sinuous shapes throughout verdant regions – a course too powerful for mighty forests of the past to withstand.

The impact of humans on the Earth

Changing our environment to suit our needs is, after all, only human.  Today many are in disbelief that we may have changed Earth’s climate in so short a time by releasing carbon stores shaped by millions of years of natural processes.  That is not so much a shock to me – since I could read, I could see the human imprint on all these wonderful maps.  (Today you just need to spend a little time traveling the planet via Google Earth to observe the human footprint.)  In fact, the climate change story goes much farther back than a century or so of dependency on fossil fuels.  William Ruddiman (Plows, Plagues and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate) contends that we have been changing climate by changing the Earth’s surface for 8000 years.  Organized cultivation made it easier to care for growing populations than by hunting and gathering but changes of the Earth’s surface to introduce agriculture affected its albedo and resulted in geobiochemical reactions that increased atmospheric concentrations of methane and carbon dioxide.  These unintended consequences unleashed forces that perturbed Earth’s energy balance and, in Ruddiman’s estimation, increased average surface temperature.

And it is not just the climate we changed, but the geosphere and biosphere though manipulation of the waterways, exploitation of fertile lands, and construction of settlements.  I had the opportunity to study agriculture in China and learned that thousands of years of cultivation have exercised every scrap of arable land – beautiful formations of terraces in Sichuan, endless fields of wheat in the North China Plain interrupted only by farming villages.  But feeding so many taxes the Earth and today China faces depletion of fertile lands and water shortages in critical areas, as do many other regions of the world.

The evolution of population maps

Many years after I lost track of my favorite Atlas, I learned that in a map-sense we actually knew very little about ourselves in any detail.  In a meeting at CIESIN in the mid-90s, I recall discussions with social scientists exclaiming the need for public access to a product called the Global Population Database (GPopDB) developed by the Center for International Research at the U.S. Bureau of the Census for the exclusive use of U.S. Government users.  By today’s standards the map was primitive, but it served the interests of a restricted user community.  This was happening in the mid-90s, at a time when our understanding of climate change was already quite mature, yet here we faced a paucity of data about humans that allowed comparative regional analysis.  CIESIN managed to publish GPopDB, opening a new cartographic era for mapping people.

The situation now is much improved, yet in need of much more improvement.  ISciences’ Global Data Hound described two high caliber population maps spatially resolved to about thirty arc seconds (one kilometer square at the equator) that provide population counts.  Landscan is a product of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a descendent of the GPopDB of the 90s.  Gridded Population of the World (GPW; see below) and its family of maps, including the Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project map (GRUMP), is an effort of CIESIN and a contribution of NASA’s Earth Science Programs.  In some sense, it too was inspired by CIESIN’s earlier experience with GPopDB.
Gridded Population of the World v3 - Adjusted Population Density

The future of mapping humanity

For the time being, CIESIN and others focused on mapping the human geography are the closest we get to “PeopleSat” – a metaphorical Earth sensor that produces scientific imagery about human beings across the globe.  (I extend my thanks to NASA for recognizing the importance of supporting the CIESIN  initiative and adding PeopleSat to its repertoire of Earth observing systems and only wish it could find a way to provide funding comparable to any one of its great satellite technology initiatives.)   Of course scientists and civil agencies worldwide champion surveys and census taking activities that provide the basic raw materials for these works.  While these in situ efforts collect hundreds of factors describing human demographics, political and economic behavior, few of these variables find their way into well-resolved, gridded maps with harmonized data that enable comparative analysis over broad regions of the Earth.  For example, CIESIN today is in the process of improving this family of products by creating disaggregated maps representing world poverty (infant mortality and child malnutrition).  Infant mortality is thought by some to reflect human stress to environmental, social, and political conditions and to be a sensitive indicator of the social and political health of nations.  Given the inconsistent standards and data gaps replete among in situ data sources, these maps are examples of the complexity involved in creating disaggregated global population maps.  However, this is an important task and I tip my hat to the data pioneers struggling with it.

World Population Day is a time to reflect about the human condition.  Human cartography, the mere geographic presentation of the human condition, somehow does not seem to rise to the same level.  But these maps are making a difference, as scientists form new expressions of human geography and increasingly use them to begin to assess the coupled interactions of humans and environment.

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-11

July 11th, 2010 · Tweets-@isciences on Twitter

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TerraViva Novice’s Journey – Celebrating World Population Day

July 8th, 2010 · Data Chatter, TerraViva Data

AUTHOR: Amber L. Iler, Research Scientist, ISCIENCES, L.L.C

everyone_counts

In 1989, the United Nations Development Programme selected July 11 as the annual day to raise awareness about global population issues. This year, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has selected the theme “Everyone Counts” to underscore the importance of data for development. It is their hope that this year’s celebration of World Population Day will “foster an understanding of why reliable, disaggregated data is so crucial to progress and encourage people to participate in the census and other data collection efforts.”[1] Much of the work we do at ISciences depends upon these types of data, and we recognize that knowing where people are on Earth is essential to understanding the interaction between humans and their environment. This knowledge can be especially meaningful when faced with assessing vulnerability to natural or man-made disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, war, or famine.

In honor of World Population Day this Sunday, I took a look at the 2 arc-minute (i.e. disaggregated) Population Density 2007 dataset previously examined by our Global Data Hound, thinking that it might exemplify the value of knowing where people are. I focused on how this LandScan-based dataset can help us calculate the population affected by a natural disaster such as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti: In January of this year, a Magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti approximately 25 km west of the capital, Port-au-Prince, resulting in the deaths of over 200,000 people.[2] Port-au-Prince is the largest city in Haiti with an official population of 704,776 as of the 2003 census,[3] but this fact alone only accounts for part of the story…

Calculating the impact of a natural disaster

[Time from launch of GDV: Under 30 seconds. Click count: 7.]

The Population Density 2007 dataset can be used to estimate how many people were within 35 km of the epicenter of the earthquake. First, open the Population Density map in TerraViva! Global Data Viewer (GDV). This map can be found under MapLibrary > Population > Population Density 2007 (ORNL).

Next, we want to zoom in on Port-au-Prince, which can be done using the Gazetteer. On the GDV toolbar you’ll find a blue icon with a white “G” inside it. Clicking on this will bring up the Gazetteer where you can select CitiesPlaces under Geographic Entity to locate any major city on your map. Begin typing “Port” in the Name field and once Port-au-Prince appears in the list, click on it, and a blinking red crosshair will appear over the city in the map window. Zoom in on this area of the map to get a better look at the population density in Haiti.

Now we will use the spatial query tool to select the Population Density map as the analysis theme and build a query searching within a 35 km buffer distance of the epicenter. The USGS reports the epicenter of the earthquake as 18.457, -72.533.[4] To center your map on this position, select MapLibrary > Map Options > Set Map Projection. A dialogue box will open and you will see a checkbox option called “Automatic Projection Parameter Setting,” which is selected by default. By deselecting this option, several fields will appear allowing you to type in the epicenter coordinates and then reproject your map to this new centerpoint.

Population of Haiti within 35 km of the epicenter of the 2010 earthquake in January. Click to enlarge.
Population at the 2010 Haiti earthquake epicenter

The spatial query tool is selected by right clicking on the Population Density map at the centerpoint, then by selecting Quick Query > Other. A window will pop up asking for the radius for the query in kilometers. Type “35″ and “Enter” and the query circle will appear on the map and the query statistics in a separate table as shown above.

The statistics for this query show that over 3 million people may have been in that area and that in the densest regions, just outside of Port-au-Prince, there may have been as many as 54,300 people in a square kilometer. The LandScan Pop Density dataset from ORNL estimates “ambient” population density – where people are likely to be at noon. Though the earthquake took place late in the afternoon on a Tuesday,[4] the population density was probably fairly similar to the estimated distribution at noon. With such a high concentration of people in this region, even under the best circumstances many would have surely been affected. As a contrast, I repeated this query centered on nearby Hispaniola in the Dominican Republic: The results show the same sized region would have only included 278,196 people.

The importance of population data

As this example shows, having specific, accurate demographic data is critical to identify where vulnerabilites to natural disasters may lie, as well as for the planning of emergency and other services. Having aggregated data on a per-country level is useful, but by collecting and analyzing disaggregated population data, important trends may be revealed.

This year, the UNFPA is highlighting the importance of data for development for World Population Day and posing the question, “What striking situation does research reveal in your country?”[5] Here at ISciences, we believe if you want to really understand your world, you first need to make sure everyone is counted.

Notes

[1] https://www.unfpa.org/public/sitemap/wpd, retrieved July 6, 2010.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake, retrieved July 6, 2010.
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port-au-Prince, retrieved July 6, 2010.
[4] http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqinthenews/2010/us2010rja6/, retrieved July 6, 2010.
[5] https://www.unfpa.org/public/site/global/lang/en/world-population-day, retrieved July 6, 2010.

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-04

July 4th, 2010 · Tweets-@isciences on Twitter

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New Report on Copenhagen

June 29th, 2010 · Data Chatter

COP15 slideshow

ISciences has released a new report in their Kyoto and Beyond series on multilateral agreements related to climate change. In order to provide context and content as nations throughout the world seek to improve and sustain our common future, the newly released Report on Copenhagen summarizes the events that transpired in December 2009 at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) in Copenhagen, Denmark. This PowerPoint slide show includes background on the Kyoto Protocol, the drafting of the Copenhagen Accord, and summarizes subsequent public discourse. In the concluding slides, we discuss the next steps needed before COP16 in Cancun, Mexico and provide a time line of relevant meetings leading up to COP16 in 2010.

The Kyoto and Beyond series provides detailed information on the evolving international climate treaty process that began with the UNFCCC. The Kyoto Protocol, drafted in 1997, is due to expire in 2012. The Protocol was a first attempt on the part of nations, with mixed results, to stem “dangerous anthropogenic interference” in the climate system. The specter of climate change poses significant challenges as we seek to improve and sustain our common future.

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