Stewart Long finished up a fantastic stitched map from the trip he led on May 9th to the southern Chandeleur Islands. Using a helium balloon, he and a group from Louisiana Bucket Brigade produced this extremely high resolution map of an oil slick surrounding a sandbar.
The boat was offered by Jim Smith of Uptown Angler (we were put in touch with him via Spencer Moss of FishingGuidesWorld.com) — many thanks!
What’s truly amazing about this map is that you can see individual birds and streaks of oil on the sandbar at the bottom (see below for full resolution).
Using imagery from Stewart Long’s May 8th overflight of Chandeleur islands, we’ve stitched together a map layer. A sample is above, and you can view the complete map here:
A couple updates: we’re now deep in the stitching process. Above is a preview; we hope to post one or two finished stitches today.
Kris Ansin of Tulane and Louisiana Bucket Brigade is coordinating mapping teams on the ground. (He’s leading a trip today). We’ve had some donations but if you’re able to, please donate to support our efforts. Even $50 will buy us a tank of helium. $100 buys us a new kite.
In the meantime we’ve had some great support from Kristian Hansen of TungstenMonkey, a local production company. Kristian documented our training session last Saturday and has posted an intro video to our project which gets across a lot of information in a very short time. Thanks Kristian!
On Sunday May 9, Stewart Long, Shannon and Mariko from Louisiana Bucket Brigade, and several other volunteers made it to the Chandeleur islands on a boat and in 9mph winds were able to image the slick making its way through the island chain. There appeared to be no booms in place at that location. In the above image you can see their boat and the tether for the balloon.
Stewart and others from LABB are scheduled to be out on a boat today down in Port Fourchon, and we may have more imagery for you then. For now, the full dataset from today is available here, and is in the public domain:
Many birds were congregating on the islands; in coming weeks we’ll be looking out for tarred and/or dead birds and other wildlife. One advantage to the high resolution we’re working at is that we hope to be able to pick out individual animals and plants, and thus better quantify the damage wreaked by the British Petroleum spill.
UPDATE: Here are some notes from Stewart Long about his flight:
“The Pilot reported that the restricted airspace is located below 30 degrees north latitude, and under 3,000′. Not sure what is determining the restrictions, but on Friday we were told that the minimum was 4,000′. Visibility was pretty good. The pilot was flying VFR, and we did not encounter any other aircraft during the flight visually, or with his instruments. We did not see any booms, and only one or two boats. Lakefront airfield was pretty quiet as well. The pilot reported that the oil in the water look redder the previous day, not sure what that indicates, if anything.”
Too much wind at Waveland today to fly our balloon, and we didn’t have a kite on hand. Can anyone donate big kites like the Sutton Flowform 16? Anyone do KAP and willing to come map with us? Contact the mailing list please!
On foot we found some weird stuff, some certainly petroleum… iridescent and leaving orange streaks. Other stuff was a kind of putty of orange claylike substance which was washed up with the orange streaks. Could this be oil all the way over at Waveland? It’s the same color as the stuff the mainstream press is photographing.
A bit of an update – on Thursday we went down to Grand Isle and met up with folks from Priority5 and the Greater Lafourche Port Commission who fed us delicious food and managed to get us out on a boat near sunset. We focused on testing the theory (suggested on the mailing list at some point) that we could tow a kite even in low winds… and amazingly it worked. The light was failing however and we did not get a lot of imagery. That stuff was posted this morning (gosh it seems like a million years ago).
We met this morning with a whole lot of volunteers (want to volunteer?) at the LA Bucket Brigade to plan a teaching strategy to increase the number of mappers and to make sure local folks were able to do balloon/kite mapping.
Tomorrow, we’re conducting a training session:
May 8 Training Session
10:00AM This Saturday we are meeting at City Park, New Orleans. Meet on the Southeast side of the Art Museum, look for us out on the lawn. The session will examine the field mapping setup, and how to train others to follow the same model. Come out to see how it is done, and learn how to do it yourself. Google Map link to City Park:
The focus is not on signing up a zillion people (yet!), but in finding local potential mapping leaders, who can organize teams of volunteers to go out to beaches and coasts to map the spill. We’ll try to schedule a mapping trip for you in the next day or two so you’ll have the experience to bring others out as well.
I design maps, visual programming environments, and other stuff at the MIT Media Lab's Design Ecology group, and as a fellow in the Center for Future Civic Media. Email me at warren@mit.edu
Tools and techniques for participatory grassroots mapping, emphasizing subjective and narrative mapping as a form of expression. By using low-cost tools like kites and balloons along with inexpensive digital cameras and mobile phones, communities can explore, document and assert their own local geographies. We are developing a map-making curriculum for kids and digital tools to publish grassroots maps in standard formats such as KML, Shapefile, and GeoJSON.
Cartagen is a set of tools for mapping, enabling users to view and configure live streams of geographic data in a dynamic, personally relevant way. These tools helps users to analyze and view collected and shared geographic and temporal data from multiple sources. The framework uses vector-based, context-sensitive drawing methods to describe data, not merely in terms of lines and polygons, but also with adaptive use of color, movement, and projection. Applications include mapping real-time air pollution, citizen reporting, and disaster response.
NEWSFLOW is a dynamic, real-time map of news reporting, which displays both the latest top stories as well as the news organizations which covered them. All articles are from the last few minutes. Viewing news in this way lets us see how the choice of 'top stories' by news bureaus is geographically unequal, or rather, what areas of the world are neglected by various national news sources. Built with HTML5 on the dynamic mapping framework CARTAGEN, NEWSFLOW draws on real-time data from over 200 news organizations as well as Google, Yahoo, and other sources.
WHOOZ is a project to map urban wildlife in realtime with SMS messages throughout Manhattan, the Bronx, and Cambridge, MA. Users can request realtime 'safaris' to find animals recently seen near their current location.
ARMSFLOW is a data visualization which displays arms transactions globally between 1950 and 2006. It includes 14,619 arms transactions (each is a sum of 1 year's exports) and 228 government entities.
Kogbox is a communal programming site where users write short re-usable snippets of code and run them in the cloud. Snippets can be shared and combined to create more complex applications.
A project mapping the flow of coffee on global, urban, local, architectural, biological, and personal scales. The full collection includes over 50 pieces on cardboard, paper, and chipboard in ink, paint, graphite, chalk, charcoal, and coffee.
Other work:
I'm a partner at Vestal Design, where I've done lots of stuff like Xobni's user interface and branding and information design for ClimateCounts. I also taught information design workshops for General Electric and Tata Consultancy Services in Mumbai.
I work occasionally and excitedly with Natalie Jeremijenko as part of her xDesign Lab at NYU.
Weardrobe is a site for tagging and organizing clothing online, which I created with Suzanne Xie and Richard Tong.
Cut&Paste Labs was founded by Diego Rotalde and me; we taught workshops on web design and development in Lima, Peru. Some went on to found their own firms:
I've also designed a few zany things which people have enjoyed, like the DoubleSpace Kitchenette:
