The devastation of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan have required large-scale imagery and geospatial visualization to grasp their scale and extent. This event had both a local and global effect from the start with tsunami waves spreading across the Pacific ocean. The force of this overwhelming natural disaster is now being overshadowed by the threat from the Fukushima nuclear plant and the potential for a far-reaching plume of radiation whose spread is dictated by wind and weather. It’s hard to imagine a more worst-case combination of disasters, and the scale and scope have warranted a whole new level of geovisualization and spatial analysis.
Today, the New York Times offers the means to visualize and forecast the potential path of the radioactive plume through an interactive map-based interface. This visualization is not an actual depiction of the radiation levels that exist, but a way to show how monitoring stations allow for the seamless visualization of the spread of radiation around the globe. Each sensor node appears as a marked and numbered dot on the above static map.
