Adventures In Mapping

This is the migration of an Osprey named Julie through the summer and fall of 2015. She hatched from a nesting post built by a Boy Scout on a small international Wildlife Reserve near Detroit, Michigan. Read Julie’s story here. Learn how the maps were made here. Detroit River, Michigan She chilled here for a … Continue reading Julie’s Migration Maps

Here are some Digital Elevation Model maps done up to be all minimalistic and stuff. Except for the one that isn’t. Here’s how to make them. Continue reading Dot Matrix Elevation Maps

Here is a small multiple showing the 12 busiest airports by passenger traffic.   Many thanks to Dylan Moriarty who helped me navigate the tantalizing, but somewhat intimidating, world of OpenStreetMap extracts. And thanks to Ken Field and Wes Jones for their graphical advice. I am surprised at the remarkable variation in scale (Hong Kong??) … Continue reading Airdrome

In my continued obsession with Tree Ring Symbols, I’ve taken the seasonal tornado Tree Ring map and sliced it up into frames. The tornado season is like a wave that forms in the gulf, crashes over middle America, then rolls back to the sea. There are a million ways to show movement (here are some … Continue reading Animated Tornado Tree Rings

Tree Ring Symbology uses a series of ring symbols, chronologically increasing in size like the growth rings of a tree. Color and/or thickness then encode some data variable. This map uses a variant, where instead of scaling the rings chronologically, like a tree, they are scaled by local aggregated tornado intensity, while the colors indicate … Continue reading Tree Ring Symbology

Here is a map of the seasonal migration that tornadoes take. Tornado migrations can be mapped like birds or wildebeests or commuters. Like just about everything else on this amazing planet of ours, they have a seasonal circuit and an ebb and flow. I live in Michigan, where I’m coming out of another winter. Believe … Continue reading Tornado Migration