Adventures In Mapping

Here is a map of 2.3 million places (160MB geodatabase) that have official US Board on Geographic Names names. When color coded by their elevation they look like this… I just like it. Continue reading Named Places by Elevation

How-to and data source here. Continue reading What Would You Name a Way Through Mountains?

The Northern Lights have been particularly amazing this fall in arctic areas, to the extent that satellites capturing nighttime imagery actually detected the surface of the Earth—illuminated by the intense aurora. Here is that remarkable imagery, via NASA Visible Earth… You can actually spot the topographic relief, particularly in southern Alaska and Yukon Territory (one … Continue reading Aurora Illumination

    Explore this data in more detail here. Continue reading Health Risk Factors, Top 10s

Here is a small collection of watercolor hachure maps using the Chevalier Shade technique of hillshading. Continue reading Chevalier Shade

This map uses the CMYK subtractive blending method to encode the rates of Smoking, Obesity, and Excessive Drinking into a single map. The source data tables come from the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps program and is available in geographic form here. It’s a lot to chew on. I’ll discuss below… The topmost graphic is … Continue reading CMYK Vice