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Apollo News Snipets – April 2012
- Who doesn’t like to sleep in or take a nice cat nap on a cloudy Sunday afternoon? Well, I know I sure do and given my love for sleep, this map caught my attention. A team of researchers from University of Pennsylvania ‘s Perelman School of Medicine analyzed data collected in 36 states by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). With more than 157,000 respondents to the 2006 telephone survey, it’s the world’s largest of its kind. The researchers determined that adults in the South had the most sleep fatigue and disturbance while those in the West had the least. After controlling for regional differences in population demography, the team from U Penn determined that mental health, race/ethnicity and access to medical care helped to best explain these patterns. I was actually surprised to hear that it was not weather and sunlight that helped to explain these patterns. You can read more about the study here.
- On the energy front, for the first time in more than 60 years, the US was a net exporter of petroleum products during 2011 with exports totaling $111.1 billion (up 60% from the previous year), making them second only to automobiles in total value exported by our nation last year. Petroleum products are materials derived from hydrocarbons and include gasoline, diesel, heating fuel, waxes and greases – the surge in 2011 was led by distillate exports, i.e. mainly diesel and to a lesser extent gasoline.
Inside the US, there continues to be strong interest in oil shales as the price of natural gas declines with our warm winter. Some estimates put our oil shale reserves at 800 billion barrels, with the highest quality reserves located in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming – that is nearly three times the amount of reserves last reported by Saudi Arabia (i.e. 267 billion)!
Speaking of Saudi Arabia, they are on the hunt to add 100 billion barrels of oil reserves by exploring areas close to existing fields as well as unexplored regions in the Red Sea. Recent international discoveries of hydrocarbon reserves include a 250 million barrel play by Statoil off the coast of Brazil; new oil fields off the coasts of Liberia and Sierra Leone by Anadarko; and Eni’s find of 850 billion cubic meters (30 trillion cubic feet) of natural gas off Mozambique’s Capo Delgado coastline.
- Are you interested in land cover across the USA during the summer as well as changes in this cover over time? If so, the USDA has an easy to use online tool, CropScape, which displays summer land cover across the US according to 30-meter pixels. Landsat data is at the root of this online application which breaks down land cover into a variety of categories such as deciduous trees, corn and alfalfa. In some locations, there is data back to 1997. USDA’s CropScape can be accessed here.
- The state of Montana has long been a pioneer in the world of GIS, for instance they were one of the first to offer online downloads of a state-wide cadastral (parcel) map. And they continue to pioneer the use of geospatial technology to serve the Public as they recently put together a series of Google Earth KMZs and Google Maps APIs that show five different plans for the upcoming redistricting. Four of the plans were drafted by state legislative staff and one by two Democratic members of the State Legislator. There are links to both the Google Earth KMZs and online Google Maps versions of the redistricting data here.
Brock Adam McCarty
Map Wizard
(720) 470-7988
brock@apollomapping.com
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