NASA’s Earth Observatory just released a map showing the vegetation anomaly in the Fertile Crescent, which shows that region of the world in terrible drought. The consequences for food security in these regions could be dire:

“The winter’s drought was followed by a hot, dry spring that further damaged crops. As a result, Iraqi farmers were anticipating a harvest as much as 51 percent smaller than the harvest of 2007, said the FAS (United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agriculture Service). Syrian farmers faired a little better, though FAS expected that the Syrian wheat harvest would be 38 percent lower than in 2007. The image shows that the drought also crept east into Iran’s wheat-growing region, where farmers were anticipating their smallest harvest in six years.”

NPR reported on Iraqi agriculture on Tuesday, and said that even now Iraq imports over 80% of their food. Clearly these pressures on the Iraqi food supply can only exacerbate tensions in Iraq, something that we absolutely don’t need.

Also recently reported on our news page, NiJeL is proud to announce our new internship program for the Summer of 2008. The deadline for applications is June 9, 2008. We have partnered with Dr. Sarah Elwood, a faculty member in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington, and if you happen to attend UW, you can receive course credit for your internship with NiJeL. To learn more about our intern program, please visit our complete intern posting here, and if you’re interested in applying, please fill out our application form here.

As we recentley reported on our news page, NiJeL is happy to announce our plans to open NiJeL East! Headed by Co-Executive Director Nancy Jones, NiJeL East will be based in Baltimore, Maryland and will lead our efforts to partner with local, community-based social change organizations as well as international organizations based in the Eastern United States. Look for more news about the opening of NiJeL East over the summer of 2008!

The Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder has put together a list of resources focused on Cyclone Nargis and Sichuan Province Earthquake. You can find that list here.

Recent Disasters in Asia – Natural Hazards Center

NPR’s All Things Considered today ran a story about the Oakland Tribune’s “Not Just a Number” Map. This is a Flash-based map that shows the locations, photos, and stories of homicide victims in Oakland in 2007. The Tribune has been compiling this map for a few years, and last year, as the NPR story points out, they decided not to use mugshots of homicide victims if this was the only photo they had. However, this year they went back to using mugshots, and the families of victims are outraged. They feel that this portrays their family members as criminals even though they were victims of a horrible crime. Melissa Block interviews Tribune editor Martin Reynolds about the map here.

‘Oakland Tribune’ Maps Murder Victims – National Public Radio

PolicyMap, a project of The Reinvestment Fund, was released today to public. PolicyMap is a very useful tool for viewing a wide range of spatial data across the U.S. – it boasts over 4,000 indicators!  The back-end is driven by PushPin, and while they never really say this on their website, it seems that they have pre-rendered thousands of layers and are serving them out as WMS or some other image format (the brute force method!). Having all those pre-rendered layers makes the site fast, but it must have taken a huge amount of up front work. Take a look here.

PolicyMap – The Reinvestment Fund

NASA’s Earth Observatory released several images today of the scale and level of destruction from the M7.9 earthquake in Sichuan Province last week (links below). The images from Taiwan’s Formosat 2 satellite images show close up images of landslide scars and collapsed bridges, and the second link (image from May 19) shows two villages behind a landslide dammed river that over the past week have be inundated.

* http://naturalhazards.nasa.gov/shownh.php3?img_id=14848
*** RSI(FORMOSAT-2) image from May 14 2008 (Posted on May 20 2008 10:12AM)
* http://naturalhazards.nasa.gov/shownh.php3?img_id=14847
*** RSI(FORMOSAT-2) image from May 19 2008 (Posted on May 20 2008 9:57AM)
* http://naturalhazards.nasa.gov/shownh.php3?img_id=14846
*** ASTER(Terra) image from Mar 19 2003 (Posted on May 20 2008 5:20PM)
* http://naturalhazards.nasa.gov/shownh.php3?img_id=14845
*** RSI(FORMOSAT-2) image from May 14 2008 (Posted on May 20 2008 10:06AM)

I came upon this excellent maplet in Google Maps today that shows the track of Cyclone Nargis and the extend of flooding in Myanmar.  This is a UNOSAT created vector layer with data from a number of different sources.

Myanmar Cyclone Nargis – Google Maps

The New York Times is reporting today that the M7.9 earthquake on Monday generated landslides that damed a number of rivers and lakes which are now beginning to overflow:

“The danger of flooding was so severe that some rescue workers had to
abandon their efforts, at least temporarily, to find people buried
beneath rubble in Beichuan, one of the hardest-hit counties. With the
chances of finding survivors dwindling by the hour so long after the
quake, such interruptions could doom the relatively few who could be
expected to be alive beneath debris.

The greatest danger of flooding came from a lake in the far north
of Sichuan Province that had already begun to overflow because of a
blockage in the Qingzhu River, according to the Xinhua news agency,
citing experts at the province’s land management department.

A rise of only 6 to 10 feet will cause the lake to “threaten more than
2,000 people who are staying in shelters after the earthquake
downstream,” said one expert.

With more rain expected Saturday night, relief officials in the county, Qingchuan, have begun evacuating
people and are considering blasting the embankment to divert the lake
water.”

It’s likely that much of these problems could have been prevented. The Times points out that:

“Experts outside China say many of the threatened dams and reservoirs
were built along the well-recognized Longmen Shan fault, and that the
dams might have sustained damage that could cause them to fail weeks
later.”

I have not seen any maps or arieals showing the extent of the landslide dams and associated flood hazards. Hopefully we’ll see a news organization put one together here shortly.

Chinese Flee Flood Threat Due to Quake – New York Times

Researchers at the the University of Maryland calculated the extent of flooding from Cyclone Nargis using both MODIS sensors on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. You can view their calculated image here. According to NASA’s Earth Observatory, the “researchers concluded that Cyclone Nargis flooded about 14,402 square kilometers (5,561 square miles) in the Irrawaddy River Delta in Burma,
an area the size of Connecticut.”

Cyclone Nargis Floods Burma (Myanmar) – Earth Observatory