Light (and Dark) Summer Reading

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Summer was in full swing and people left for vacation to try to get a break from the rat race… but, you can’t escape geodata! More or less everybody is using navigation devices to find their location and enjoy Mother Nature. Lately, more and more people ask themselves what happened to the summer? Is it getting hotter or rainier?

Matt Fitzpatrick from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science has created an interesting map that links a location to another one representing the climate situation in the next 60 years for the first selection. With this help, you can experience potential future climate change already now: For example, Berlin will get 5.7°C warmer and 8.1% drier than today. That is similar to Padulle, North of Bologna. San Francisco will get 4.7°C warmer and incredible 387.9% wetter! This compares to Jamul, east of San Diego. San Diego itself will get 4.3°C warmer and 127.5% wetter, which is similar to Vicente Guerrero in Mexico (all results base on the “high emissions trajectory” and select an average of five forecasts. You can also select a reduced emission forecast model, but, to be honest, how realistic is this?). You can already start a trip around the world by selecting the next “best climate analogy” as next “selected city”.

But, sometimes there is no equivalent. Especially if you look at Africa or central Asia, only a few data points are available. Additionally, for locations close to the equator matches get complicated because of the magnitude of expected climate change. Details about the included data can be found in the paper about climate analogs of 540 North American urban areas.

Sometimes you really want to be connected to Mother Nature and what is better than looking into the stars? We already know that we are polluting our environment not only with exhaust gases but also with light. Jurij Stare created the light pollution atlas based on the data of GFZ Helmholtz Centre Potsdam. With the help of data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) you can dive back into the past and see how light emission changed and where to find absolute darkness. In Europe you have to go deep into to the Austrian Eastern Alps, into Latvia’s backcountry or Northern Sweden and Finland. It is incredible to see how bright northern Norway is (select “World Atlas 2015” for a good average layer). If you look into the statistic, you will see that the Scandinavian countries are getting brighter by roughly +2% whereas the Netherlands (-2.49%) and France (-3.87%) are getting darker. North Korea gets brighter by +5.79%; South Korea follows this trend by +2.85%. But looking at the average mean of artificial radiance reveals the popular example: North Korea is way darker (0.022) compared to South Korea (4.043).

With the additional radiance light trends map you can create plots of specific areas and see if it gets darker or brighter. For example, Berlin got a little bit darker (0.12% per year for the last ten years) whereas San Francisco got 2.23% darker (with a significant cut from 2018 to 2019). The opposite happens in Pyongyang that got 6.82% brighter.

By the way, despite the fact that the light pollution atlas is focusing on artificial light it also features an hourly Aurora Borealis forecast layer.

Still in need of some holiday reading? For our German readers you can have a look into the KATAPULT magazine, which translates scientific as well as social topics into (witty) maps since 2015. The idea is to transport scientific knowledge in a comprehensible way (and sometimes an illustration tells more than a thousand words). Since 2020 KATAPULT is also a publishing non-fiction books, novels and calendars in-house.

Of course, they used also the light emission maps to show, for example, what happened with Syria when the people turned against Assad. The city of Aleppo more or less vanished and with the light a lot of the citizen have lost their lives. Also the famous comparison between North and South Korea is always worth a cover page.

But, the content which the KATAPULT magazine is trying to communicate is more than just some maps. It is about visualizing the “relation”. It is fascinating to see when only small countries are producing most of a valuable asset worldwide. It is unbelievable how many countries are not following specific agreements. It is eye-opening when the garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean is compared to European countries. But such “overwhelming” comparisons are often hard to really understand (e.g., when continents are drifting or solar systems are fusing) and “local” comparisons can be even more helpful because the reader can map it to their daily life. Recently, the KATAPULT magazine started to prepare special issues for upcoming elections in some of the German federal states. The topic is to show how much of the public life would collapse if there was no migration. One showcase is to map how many hospitals would have to stop operating and with this to emphasize in which regions no assistance could be provided any more. Or, how many care facilities and retirement homes would have to reject requests for day care. Compared to the real migration rate this can set some “discussions” into the right context.

And if this is still too much, it is also interesting to read how much of Greenland is already cleared of ice (400,000 years ago most of Greenland was ice-free) or compare the radical left and right (and religious) domestic terrorist attacks in the US.

Anyway. Whatever you prefer to read in your vacation: Stay open-minded and consider that we are not alone on this planet and that we have effect on it with everything we are doing. Reading and traveling educates!