Probability of a White Christmas

The National Climatic Data Center released an interactive map showing the historical probability of a white Christmas for the lower 48 states:

Are You Dreaming of a White Christmas?

Using the interactive map, the highest percentages I could find in Ohio are in Geauga and Ashtabula County (Chardon is at 61%) and the lowest are in the very southern tip of the state, Scioto, Lawrence and Gallia Counties (Gallipolis was the lowest at 3%).

In Pennsylvania, the highest percentages are in the snowbelt south and east of Erie (Kane is 74% and Union City is 72%), but also Wayne County northeast of Scranton (Pleasant Mount is 71%) and in the highlands around Somerset and Johnstown (58%).

The lowest probability of a white Christmas in Pennsylvania is in Marcus Hook, at the extreme southeast corner of the state, at just a 1% chance of at least 1 inch of snow on the ground on December 25th.

2020 Baseball Travel

Major League Baseball has released a schedule, and as anticipated teams will be playing a schedule against teams in their own geographic division, but both leagues.

Daren Willman on Twitter has mapped out what that will look like:






Australia Wildfire Perspective

There are a lot of different visualizations out there of the scope of the Australian wildfires, and realizing that the wildfires are spread over an even larger area, not just consolidated into one, it’s still jarring to realize that he area burned up to this point basically corresponds to all of Southwest Ohio.

Pennsylvania and the Sheetz/Wawa Battle Line

Sheetz only started expanding into Northeast Ohio back in the 1990s, so I've only recently become aware of the great battle for gas station food supremacy taking place in Pennsylvania.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but they both provide.... gas station food.

The Infamous Strava Heatmap (and why it's fun)

Strava Labs produces a map showing the activities and locations of users of their fitness app.  It was last updated in November of 2017, but it has found its way into the news this week after a Twitter user realized that the data on the map can give away the location of sensitive locations such as military bases and the fitness and patrol routes of people inside the base wearing fitness trackers.

Certainly there is something here that the military needs to consider when it comes to data security, but I feel like the story as reported in the media has been blown out of proportion to some degree.

That said, I'm glad that the media spotlight has fallen on this website, because as map geek there's a lot here to see and explore.

The software filters out car rides and airplane rides by speed, so the result is a map showing where someone has walked, run, cycled, swam, etc. while wearing a fitness tracker.  Parks, trails, and any place with high pedestrian traffic jumps out right away.

Zooming in at the area around our home office, there are three things that jump out at me right away:

1) Summit Mall - you can see the interior walkways of the mall
2) Croghan Park - the footpath which circles around the park is lit up
3) Sand Run Parkway - this road is a popular walking and jogging path, which opens up into a dedicated footpath in the park itself

Strava Heatmap.jpg

There are all sorts of interesting things to find on the map.  Here are a few things I found after a little exploring:

You can see the kayak (and possibly swim?) paths of people crossing Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island of Hawai'i to get to the Captain Cook Monument.

Looking at an overview of the Columbus area, I'm struck by how much the map is just showing where fitness tracker users are.  The northwest quadrant of the city, which is more affluent, is lit up much more than the northeast, and you could pretty much draw the city limits of Bexley based solely on this data.

Here's Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, a place I'm hoping to walk around myself a few times this year.

Where is the Snow?

One important thing we always have to consider is what the weather is going to be at the actual location being surveyed, not just at the home office.  That's usually a straight-forward matter of looking ahead, but sometimes what's important is what happened there previously.

I've left home on a warm day in the winter with no snow on the ground, only to arrive at a site with lots of snow cover - which is why I like to check the NOAA National Snow Analyses page before heading to a site this time of year.

It has 9 useful national maps, but the one I generally find most useful is the Snow Depth map, which shows current snow depths nationwide, updated daily.  Looking at it today, I can see that most of Ohio is snow-free after after a few days of temperatures above freezing and rain, but the north half of Pennsylvania still has snow cover of 1-10 inches.

There are also zoomed-in maps of particular regions, like the Southern Great Lakes or Allegheny Front.

dormant.uprooting.premiums

Time will tell if the idea will take off, but I think the universal addressing/mapping system created by what3words is really fascinating.

The idea is simple and elegant - the world is divided into 3m x 3m squares, and each square is given a three-word code to describe it.

This makes addresses easier to remember than a latitude/longitude and more precise than a normal street address.  Much of the world has no street addresses at all, and even in developed countries, street addresses are unreliable outside of urban areas, and not particularly precise inside of them.

The address of our main office is:

173 Owosso Ave
Fairlawn, OH 44333-3724

But the corresponding what3words address would be:

dormant.uprooting.premiums

Which not only directs to the office, but directly to the front door.  With a 3m grid, you can actually specify particular doors or entrances.

Our old office was a multi-unit building, and edges.breed.icon would have taken you straight to the front door.

I'm really impressed at the level of thought that's gone into the system - addresses are available in multiple languages, using simple words, with more common or shorter words in areas with higher populations.  Addresses with similar word combinations are intentionally far away from each other.

You can use the web map to find the address for any location:

https://map.what3words.com/

We've moved!

North Coast Geomatics has a new address!

As of September 1st, we are now located at:

173 Owosso Ave
Fairlawn, OH 44333-3724

Our service area is unchanged.

Our Contact page has been updated to the new address, and it is still the best way to reach us.

New Frontiers

IMG_20170817_001121_586 2.jpg

I'm very happy to announce the addition of Eric Jackson to our team at North Coast Geomatics!  You can find out more about Eric on our about page, but I have had the privilege of working with him in the past and am very excited to do so again.

Eric has also recently become registered as a professional land surveyor in Pennsylvania, so North Coast Geomatics is now able to provide surveying and mapping services not just in Ohio, but Pennsylvania as well!

Farms of Long Ago

I once assisted a surveyor in Maine with a boundary survey of a parcel that was once a large farm, back in the 18th century, but now was entirely forested.  There were old stone walls running along all of the boundary lines, but the farm had been abandoned and reverted to forest over a century ago.  Driving by the site on the road, I would never have known that it had been completely cleared at one time.

The NASA Earth Observatory has an interesting story on how those stone walls and old land use patterns are still visible from above when using lidar:

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=90683&src=eorss-iotd