One of the best ways of doing geojournalism is to use the images of MODIS Subsets (http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/). I know some people, with GIS background, might raise some caveats about the resolution of the images, but the information available is just amazing.
Distribution of NASA´s Modis subsets
By clicking in one of these red squares you can find almost everyday images of everysingle part of the planet. Even better you can ask to see the fire pixels on the image.
And more, as we journalists are not the experts in GIS, the Subsets images can be automaticaly overlayed on Google Earth. Just click on the “Download KMZ file to Google Earth” and you can place yourself on the map. I mean then you can find what the satellite image is telling us about.
This is specialy good for monitoring forest fires. On a previous http://geojournalism.wordpress.com/2008/11/30/monitoring-a-protected-area/ I have just show you how to find shapes of protected areas. If you cross this shapes and the Modis images, you can really built a new content for you readers. You do not even need to be a GIS expert!
2 responses so far ↓
Fires in South East Asia « Geojournalism.com // February 22, 2009 at 8:48 pm |
[...] also happening at the Hindu Kush Himalayan range. I fowarded some images that I could find at the Modis Rapid Fire Subsets [...]
Journalism and the democratization of satellites « Geojournalism.com // March 27, 2009 at 3:18 pm |
[...] how useful it might be to tell a story about deforestation just spotting fire pixels in a map. Also how powerful it is to grab a image from the Modis Subset website and interpret it by yourself. I think the idea about having journalists doing this is having a complete different approach to [...]