Ice storm halts some US Midwest pipelines

Power outage impacts Magellan and Enbridge

We put together a quick map for Oilgram News last week.

An ice storm in Oklahoma caused major power outages December 10 and shut several US Midwest pipelines and terminals, sources said.

Half the northeastern Oklahoma region, including the Tulsa area, was without electricity December 10 as heavy ice caused trees to snap and fall, taking power lines with them, the Tulsa World newspaper reported on its web site.

More from Google (Terrain!)

Google has recently added a new terrain feature to their widely used online mapping application. In the "pre-digital age" terrains and relief shading were painted or drawn after years of surveying the landscape with manual instruments. For great examples of this type of work look to Swiss cartographer Eduard Imof as well as many others.

Eduard Imhof

"Karte der Gegend um den Walensee" (section) by E. Imhof 1:10,000, 1938."

Nowadays terrain like Google's are generated digitally from Digital Elevation Models. Overal it's a great addition to an already impressive product. It's interesting to toggle between the satellite imagery and the terrain. In many cases the terrain allows you to visualize the landscape much better than the photograph. Example below:

Google at the Gas Pump

In case you missed it on CNN, starting next month Google is going to start offering map directions for local businesses, restaurants, hospitals, et cetera, at over 3,500 gas stations via a small color computer screen. I'm assuming it's a light-weight version of their Google map product. The initial offering will allow users to search several screens of common listings, but you won't be able to type-in individual addresses just yet. From what we know of Google, we won't have to wait too long. Once you find the directions you need, you simply print the map with your receipt.

Bringing digital directions to the gas pump seems so obvious (now); but it takes an ingenious company like Google to make it a reality. It's hard to find many companies that are changing "how we do things" on such a broad-scale and in so little time.

You can read the rest of the article here: Google at the Gas Pump

San Francisco Bay Oil Spill

Here are a few examples of some maps of last weeks San Francisco Bay Oil Spill made from Google map-maker tools. The San Francisco Chronicle's map and the KCBS map.

These FAA flight pattern maps may be some of the most beautiful and abstract maps you've ever seen. The maps were created for the Celestial Mechanics project, " that visualizes the statistics, data, and protocols of manmade aerial technologies".

McGraw-Hill Offices on the Map

We put together a quick map of an updated list of McGraw-Hill Offices in the United States. We also plan to get all of the international offices in soon. This map is a great example of beginning to build a mash up of data. This is just a first pass of mapping the offices. We would like input from other McGraw-Hill employees and eventually a revised list of actual locations. After you take a look at your office, check out the Bird's eye view and try the 3d view as well. You will be prompted to download a 3d driver. The capabilities of both Microsoft's Live Search Maps and Google's Earth/Maps are still developing, but it is already a great way to find information and data in a visual way.

Globe4D- the four dimensional interactive globe

Here is an example of how traditional geospatial products like the globe are changing due to advancements in geospatial technologies and a growing public interest.

Globe4D is an interactive globe that allows users to view data-sets as they change over time - time being the 4th dimension. It's an interesting concept and gives us all something to think about and look forward to. How useful would it be to add custom data-sets and view those data-sets over time (forwards and backwards) in a "hands-on" interactive environment? Be sure and watch the product videos at the companies website.

You can learn more about the globe: here

Platts releases Power Plants of Russia map

Platts has utilized the latest, industry-leading generation data to create this wall map of the supply of current and planned generation in Russia. The Power Plants of Russia, 2007/2008 edition, is the most accurate and detailed power generation reference available. Map features include:
-Nearly 800 existing and planned power plants, colored by primary fuel type, symbolized by operational status and sized by generation capacity
-Detailed plant locator table including plant name, operator, fuel, installed megawatts, projected megawatts and plant operational status
-Rich geographic content including topography, major cities and states

Nuclear Plant Engineer hides corrosion damage

MSNBC reports here on an engineer at the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant who was convicted of misleading regulators about "the worst corrosion ever found at a U.S. reactor" and attesting that the plant was safe.


View Larger Map

Plant Location courtesy of POWERmap

This video might take a little while to load (and there's no sound) but it is pretty cool-it showcases the new birds-eye navigation in Microsoft's Virtual Earth. Never seen Virtual Earth? It's Microsoft's alternative to Google Earth and is embed right in your web browser rather than a separate application. This video demonstrates VE's technology whereby they actually drape mosaic'd photographs of actual buildings over 3-d models of the urban landscape. This technology was developed by Boulder, CO based Vexcel Corporation, a leader in the remote sensing business.

Real World GIS: Points, Lines, Polygons

If you’re a reader of maps, then you’re already familiar with the common graphical devices map makers (cartographers) use to represent real world features on a two-dimensional surface. If you look at a common reference map, like a road map, you may see rest-stops displayed as a point of some kind; highways and roads displayed as lines colored and sized by their type; and perhaps a city metropolitan area displayed as an enclosed polygon delineating the extent of the urban area.

So how does this relate to GIS? A Geographical Information System stores and represents real world features using the same graphical methodology. Every discrete feature on the Earth’s surface can be represented as a point, line, or polygon. And by discrete, I refer to features that have a distinct boundary, like power-plants, substations, transmission lines and counties. Examples of continuous features - features that exist “everywhere”- include wind speed, elevation, and temperature. For now we’ll keep our focus on discrete data that can be represented with geometric shapes (vectors) and save our “continuous data” discussion for another day.

So how do we decide how to represent a feature within a GIS? The short answer is… it depends upon how close or how far away we are from the object, aka “map scale”. I’ll discuss map scale in more detail in my next post. In the meantime, here’s an example. If you’re looking at a map showing the entirety of North America, New York City would be best shown as a single point. After all, from that far away, even a polygon or line would look like a point, so it makes sense to use a point. On the flip side, if you were looking at a road- map of the state of New York, New York City would be better represented as polygon showing the boundary of the urban area. See the relationship? The important concept to remember here is that all features of the discrete type are displayed using points, lines, or polygons (nothing else), and that the symbol type used is scale dependant.

In my next post I’ll discuss “map scale” in more detail and how it relates to the GIS layers developed and offered by Platts Geospatial.

An aerial view of daylight

I found this interesting view of daylight on the Earth's surface while websurfing this weekend. You can even adjust it to view clouds or weather patterns.
Click here

Here is a more visually exciting option but without some of the options. Click here.

Great map podcast

The radio series This American Life broadcast a fascinating story of a cartographer intent on mapping the unconventional features of a landscape. Well worth the listen: Click here

What is a GIS?

GIS is short for Geographic Information Systems, a fancy way of saying “digital maps”. Ultimately, a GIS is a database with geographic features attached. It allows the data querying that one is accustomed to in the data environment with the added dimension of allowing one to perform those queries spatially and view your results in a map. This is a very exciting time to explore the power of maps and GIS thanks to an ever expanding array of software tools both for the layperson and the expert.

Welcome to the Platts Geospatial blog

Our aim with this site is to give our customers and those in the Energy industry a place to learn about what you can do with maps and GIS (we’ll explain what that is) to further your analytical needs. Our goal with this site is to turn on those in the energy industry to news and resources in the GIS world in the hopes that we can help you do your job better and maybe even ignite in you the same excitement that we have for maps and GIS.