Staying ahead of a superstorm with open-data visualizations. Hurricane Sandy, widely dubbed ‘Frankenstorm’ by the media, caused devastation and death across the US east coast last week, but the latest satellite and government data were used by infomediaries – individuals or groups that create value out of information – to turn a voluminous amount of data into useful, life-saving, and, some-might-say, beautiful mashup of text, graphics, video, and animations.
This article was originally published in International Science Grid This Week: ISGTW is an international weekly online publication that covers distributed computing and the research it enables. On the website ‘Strata: making data work’ – created by Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly media and a prominent advocate of the open-source movement – a number of examples are given of open government data feeds used as sources for critical infrastructure during one the largest storms to ever hit the US. Beautiful, deadly, and helpful Snapshot of North American wind map visualization on 30 October 2012. A View Inside Sandy. Satellite instruments captured numerous images of Hurricane Sandy—using both daylight and moonlight—as the enormous storm approached the heavily-populated East Coast of the United States in late October 2012.
In most cases, these instruments observed just the uppermost layer of clouds at the top of the storm. However, one satellite—Cloudsat—peered inside the storm and observed its vertical structure. Sandy: un avant-goût du réchauffement climatique?
Avant Sandy. Pendant Sandy. After Sandy. Social media sandy. Divers.