Robert Simmon

You can always get a second set. And I agree on the food map, it’s incredible.

I got my set of
@infowetrust.com 's Maps for Kids today. I thought for my grandkids, but I may end up keeping them myself.

This one, on Food Energy is particularly brilliant. The loveliest trilinear plot ever seen.

Get yours at visionarypress.com/pages/maps-f...

Hill shading after bilinear interpolation — you can see faint horizontal and vertical lines that are an artifact of the interpolation with a non-integer ratio.

Hill shading after bicubic spline interpolation — there are few visible artifacts from the interpolation.

Be careful with your interpolation settings in GDAL. On the left is bilinear, on the right is cubicspline. Look carefully and you can see vertical and horizontal lines in the shaded relief map made with a bilinear sampled DEM. Probably from a non-integer scaling ratio.

Making presentations & writing blog posts! Double-dashes get converted to em-dashes when I copy/paste.

Pro tip: the solar filters you bought to watch the eclipse are also great for sunspot spotting. 😎

I wonder if the reception would have been better if the new color scheme used a sequential palette, scaled to show light rainfall while still emphasizing extremes?

🎨

old (left) and new (right) rain radar color palettes from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. They are both variants on the rainbow palette, with very high contrast between reflectivity/rainfall levels. The new palette changed the scaling so the heaviest rainfall was orange, not black.

Here’s a comparison of the old and new palettes. It’s an interesting case study in how many aspects of visualization are an artifact of convention, and not best practices. People get accustomed to things being done a certain way, and changing those expectations need to show a clear benefit.

Colour as Strategy and Aesthetics: What the Bureau of Meteorology’s Radar Teaches About Data Visualisation An ill-fated radar redesign reminds us that colour decisions are never cosmetic, they define how data is read and believed.

Insightful post by @darraghmurray.bsky.social about the public backlash when the Australian Bureau of Meteorology changed the color palette for rain radar data:

thedatavist.substack.com/p/colour-as-...

#dataviz #cartography 📊🗺️

A Gentle Introduction to GDAL Part 10: Python & the Command Line Scripting directly on the command line with Bash or Zsh is relatively straightforward: work out a sequence of commands, then wrap them in a…

Curious about using Python to make #maps but don’t know where to start? I wrote a tutorial that’s ostensibly about GDAL but is really a beginner’s guide to programming: medium.com/@robsimmon/a...

This image of North and South America at night is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012. The new data was mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet. Most of the Earth appears as it would after dark, with city lights glowing underneath clouds. There’s a thin arc of atmosphere, simulating how daybreak would look from far above the Earth.

One from the archives. The first 6 months of VIIRS Day Night Band data, an instrument sensitive enough to see snow by starlight. Rendered in Cinema4D with a physically based atmosphere shader. I put *a lot* of work into the clouds, and how they would appear from space at night.

#dataviz #NASA #NOAA

“Real” fonts have different width spaces for different purposes. Monospaced fonts are all the same, so can’t give the extra breathing room that should be at the end of a sentence.

On typewriters, double spaces after periods was the norm since every character was always the same width. Many people continued the habit even after moving to computers that have typefaces with variable width characters & properly widen a space after a period relative to one between letters.

False Earthquake Alert Likely Triggered by ‘Something Out in the Field,’ USGS Says | KQED The USGS, which said at least four seismic stations detected ground motion that signaled a quake, quickly canceled the warning that startled the Bay Area.

“…something triggered the system, but it wasn’t an earthquake.”

Sounds like the beginning of a Godzilla movie!

www.kqed.org/news/1206608...

Did Europeans not have typewriters? Or were they attuned enough to design to pay attention to typography as soon as proportional fonts were available?

What are your thoughts on two spaces after a period?

I have just discovered the nightmare of double dashes (--) used for flags on the UNIX command line. I’m trying to document commands & both Medium & Keynote automatically convert that to an em dash (—). 🤦

Exhibit Hall Tour: Drone-Mounted Sensors for Geoscience Studies Tuesday, December 16, 2025, 12:30-1:30PM Join us for a guided tour of the AGU Exhibit Hall! Small drones (sUAS) are now used in almost all geoscience fields, from volcanoes to hydrology, and more! Just as drone platform capabilities and availability have increased, the variety of small, light-weight scientific sensors is also rapidly expanding and evolving. Join us for a short expedition to the AGU25 Exhibit Hall to visit exhibitors who provide sensors that can be mounted on small drones for low-altitude airborne surveys. Come connect with colleagues and vendors! Tour Guide: Cian Dawson (cian@cbdawson.com)

Ok, #AGU25 is fast approaching & I should really be getting the word out about some activities I'm excited about...

This year we're launching a new initiative, exhibit hall tours! Join me for a guided tour focused on drone-based sensors. Learn more or sign up: gatherspot.org/events/54252...

[04/24] And we continue our data riddle advent calendar together with this 4th riddle! So?

I just realized Soylent Green and Fried Green Tomatoes are both about cannibalism, and both have green in the title. But I don’t think it is either of those. Colored illustration depicting ships of Greece, showing the depletion of the merchant marine during World War II.

I don’t speak Greek, but I really like this infographic from the David Rumsey Map Collection. www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet...

City Lights of the Americas The Suomi NPP satellite has a potent new sensor for distinguishing Earth’s night lights.

Most of my effort on the underlying map was spent on tweaking non-linear scaling of the brightness (the dynamic range is a few orders of magnitude better than DMSP, the predecessor instrument) & cleaning artifacts (starlight illuminated snow.)

www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/79787...

This image of North and South America at night is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012. The new data was mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet. Most of the Earth appears as it would after dark, with city lights glowing underneath clouds. There’s a thin arc of atmosphere, simulating how daybreak would look from far above the Earth.

One from the archives. The first 6 months of VIIRS Day Night Band data, an instrument sensitive enough to see snow by starlight. Rendered in Cinema4D with a physically based atmosphere shader. I put *a lot* of work into the clouds, and how they would appear from space at night.

#dataviz #NASA #NOAA

A Gentle Introduction to GDAL Part 10: Python & the Command Line Scripting directly on the command line with Bash or Zsh is relatively straightforward: work out a sequence of commands, then wrap them in a…

Curious about using Python to make #maps but don’t know where to start? I wrote a tutorial that’s ostensibly about GDAL but is really a beginner’s guide to programming: medium.com/@robsimmon/a...

“Odd” is putting it mildly.

Earthquake warning with the message DROP! COVER! HOLD ON!

#earthquake warning for an M6 in *Nevada* !?! (I’m near SF)

That has serious “boy who cried wolf” vibes.

Caps and Sharks facing off at Center Ice.

Hockey!

No outcrops, but plenty of alluvial fill and an incised stream (and there are outcrops not *too* far away). Plus you could play the "which of these houses are bisected by the Hayward Fault?" game.

A Gentle Introduction to GDAL Part 10: Python & the Command Line Scripting directly on the command line with Bash or Zsh is relatively straightforward: work out a sequence of commands, then wrap them in a…

I just published a new installment of “A Gentle Introduction to GDAL” — Python & the Command Line.

#dataviz #cartography #python #gdal

medium.com/@robsimmon/a...

Completely skipping my neighborhood. 🙄

Lost in Translation? Vintage highly oblique map of the main Japanese Islands. South is left and north is right.

A "rather unusual map of Japan" from the Rumsey Map Center. www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet...

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments (or if you find any mistakes 😬).