Map Watch News

A wet winter season in the southwestern states has produced a thick vegetation growth that is now dry enough to catch fire. Lightning strikes and other events have sparked several wildfires in California, Arizona, Nevada and Utah, some of which can be seen in this satellite image (West Side Complex, Good Springs and Hackberry Complex). Strong winds and hot temperatures have made these fires difficult to contain. They now threaten or have destroyed numerous subdivisions and recreational sites. Many famlies have been evacuated.
Read more and see additional images for Wildfires in California, Arizona, Nevada and Utah at NASA's EarthObservatory website.

Emergency response crews located a woman involved in a boating accident using information transmitted from her cell phone. This is one of the better stories of how valuable GPS can be in rescue efforts.
Read more about GPS / Cell Phone Rescue at the Galveston Daily News.

You can also visit our "Uses of GPS" page to read several short articles about how GPS is used in agriculture, farming, busing, taxi cabs, photography, emergency response, fishing, fleet management, tracking kids and pets, law enforcement, sports and science field work.

MSN has integrated thei search engine with their MapPoint software. With it you can create maps showing the location of businesses or residences of people. Here are a couple of searches to try...

Pizza Hut San Francisco CA

Smith Harrisburg PA

Note how you can mouse over the map locations and the listings on the left side of the screen change colors. Also by mousing over the listings, the map locations change colors. If you experiment with this search tool you will find a number of bugs and map clarity problems but since it is in beta improvements are likely to follow.

It's hurricane season again and coastal states are getting ready to weather the storms. In the event of a large storm making landfall evacuation plans for thousands of people must be planned in advance to avoid major problems. Louisiana has published a Hurricane Evacuation Map that shows which areas are to evacuate first, the times that they are to evacuate and the roads which will serve as major evacuation routes (all lanes on some of these highways will be used to handle the heavy traffic flow expected. The Louisiana State Police, Louisiana State Deparment of Transportation, the Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness and the American Red Cross coordinated production and printing for one million copies of the map.
Visit the Louisiana Department of transportation website if you want to get a close-up look at the Hurricane Evacuation Map.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has published a Great Lakes ice cover atlas that contains ice cover charts and animated maps. By viewing these animations you can see the expansion and contraction of the ice pack across Lake Huron, Lake Ontario, Lake Michigan, Lake Erie and Lake Superior. The map animations will open in your media player window. A very large number of animations are available and NOAA is making the collection available on CD-ROM.
See the Great Lakes Ice Charts at the NOAA website.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has posted the results of over 150 years of hurricane tracking on their website. There you can see cumulative hurricane track maps for Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia.
Visit the NOAA website to see the Hurricane Tracking Maps.

The California Geographical Survey has published an online digital atlas for the state of Oregon. This collection contains over 500 mathmatically derived images that display the state's landforms, environments and culture in ways that have not been published before.
View the Oregon Map and Aerial Image Atlas.

A small collection of maps related to the 2004 Indonesia Tsunami have been posted at geology.com. Shown are a location map, an epicenter and aftershock map, a travel time map for the wave and a wave height map.
Read more at the geology.com Tsunami Map page.

The US Geological Survey is updating a map of below normal streamflow conditions. Their map gives a general overview of recent drought conditions. Drought conditions are based upon local stream gages recording discharge values that are in the lowest 25th percentile for that date compared to the historical record. This means that of all years that records have been kept at least 75% of the years for that date had higher discharge values.
Visit the USGS website to see today's Drought Map.

The New Hampshire Fish and Game Department has published 130 lake and pond maps to their website. These maps show lake depth, topography and other useful information for fishing, boating, scuba diving and other lake activities.
View the New Hampshire Lake Maps