Robin Hawkes

Senior Principal Engineer at Wood Mackenzie. Creator of ViziCities. Previously Senior Engineer at UrbanSim, worldwide devrel at Mozilla. Obsessed with maps and data.

Wales, UK

262 posts

Community features

Geoq: Geospatial utility belt

Horace Williams has put together a command-line toolbox for general spatial data processing and visualisation. I particularly like the ability to quickly view the results on a geojson.io map. worace/geoqGeospatial Utility Belt. Contribute to worace/geoq development by creating an account on

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Compression benchmarks for 1m elevation data stored as GeoTIFF

Martin Isenburg has put together a set of benchmarks showing compression ratios for elevation data stored as GeoTIFF. While there are some clear winners, the impressive results of DEMzip for compression are worthy of further investigation. First independent #DEMzip tests using #GDAL are in:

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Archive of National Geographic's vintage maps

National Geographic have digitally compiled 6,000+ maps from their vintage collection. Some of these maps will be slowly released over the coming weeks as they work their way through the huge collection. Aside: I debated adding this one to the newsletter as the

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Before & after of latest NOAA weather model update

Cameron Beccario (of earth.nullschool.net fame) recently shared an example of how detailed the new NOAA weather forecasting model is compared to the old version. In short, it’s much more detailed! Striking difference in detail before and after the new FV3 dynamical

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The North Sea

Owen Powell has put together a beautiful shaded relief map of the North Sea using Blender and elevation data from EMODnet. I love the colour scheme! 🎨 The North Sea. Excellent (EU funded) data from @EMODnet #b3d pic.twitter.com/a3H1Nn7X9C — Owen Powell (@owenjpowell)

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Rock Climbing Map: Vancouver, British Columbia

This map by Sarah Bell is another great example of a monochrome map. In it she uses isochrones to show all the climbing areas within 3 hours of Vancouver. Nice attention to detail! 👌 Rock Climbing Map: Vancouver, British ColumbiaSometimes people ask me if I

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MapSCII: The whole world in your console

Have you ever wanted an interactive map in your command-line interface? Probably not. Even so, MapSCII is quirky, retro and as interesting for the technology as it is for its novelty (it uses vector tiles!). rastapasta/mapscii🗺 MapSCII is a Braille & ASCII world

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Trails of Wind

Trails of Wind maps airport runways from around the world, colour-coding them by orientation. The result is a beautiful map that highlights the intricate patterns created by the runways as each is orientated to maximise the use of prevailing winds. Also worth checking out

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Craig Taylor

I’ve been a fan of Craig Taylor for a while now — his work in 3D spatial visualisation is second to none and he is a constant source of inspiration. He works at Ito World and creates all sorts of beautiful visualisations; ranging from

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OpenStreetMap planet data as GeoPackage

Storing spatial data in a GeoPackage is particularly hot at the moment. You can now access OpenStreetMap planet data in GeoPackage format, updated every two months. Global OpenStreetMap data extracts | osmdata.xyzOpenStreetMap data extracts on a global scale as GeoPackages | osmdata.xyzosmdata.xyz

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MarineCadastre.gov vessel traffic data (AIS)

If you’re at all interested in data related to shipping then you should check out the MarineCadastre.gov vessel traffic data. It includes minute-by-minute snapshots of vessel positions off the coast of the US since 2009. Vessel Traffic Data

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OpenStreetMap and curb regulations

SharedStreets have created an open standard for curb restriction data (eg. parking restrictions) and have been working on integrating this standard into OpenStreetMap. The idea is that governments can release curb-restriction data and it can be directly integrated into tools and maps using this

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Calculating 30 billion speed estimates a week with Apache Spark

Mapbox collect over 300 million miles of anonymised location data every day to produce speed estimations for routing. This article by Saba El-Hilo goes into detail about how they use Apache Spark to calculate 30 billion of those speed estimations each week. Calculating 30

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What to consider when creating choropleth maps

This fantastic article by Datawrapper covers the various things to consider when using choropleth maps. It’s a useful reference for understanding when to use a choropleth and how to make them communicate things better. What to consider when creating choropleth mapsSimple do’s

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Finding hidden ship tracks

NASA are using machine learning to detect particles emitted from ships as they work their way across the oceans. They do this using data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on their Aqua satellite. It’s even possible to detect the ships at

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kepler.gl (3D maps) for Jupyter

Uber have integrated their kepler.gl 3D spatial visualisation library into Jupyter Notebook. It’s now possible to plot complex maps directly inside a notebook by using Python as you would normally. I’m excited to see what sorts of things people create using

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Delaunator v4

Vladimir Agafonkin (creator of Leaflet) has released v4 of Delaunator. It’s a super-fast library for Delaunay triangulation and the latest update improves performance by up to 10%. His other libraries are worth checking out as he’s obsessed with making them as fast

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earthpy released

Earth Lab at the University of Colorado have released earthpy, a Python package to support working with spatial data. It can be used for both raster and vector data and can do things like creating hillshades and other types of analysis. earthlab/earthpyA package

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TravelTime releases isochrone plugin for QGIS

It’s now possible to create isochrone visualisations in QGIS using a new plugin by TravelTime. The plugin supports multiple modes of transport and is free to use for the first 5,000 requests per month. Blog | TravelTime platform releases isochrone QGIS pluginCreate a

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Colouring London

The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) has released their Colouring London project, which attempts to use crowd-sourcing to collect information on every building in London. So far the collected area is small, though this will likely change as more people get involved.

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Storms in 3D using precipitation radar data

I’m a sucker for 3D spatial visualisations and this one of Super Typhoon Nepartak by Craig Taylor is no exception. He’s taken NASA precipitation radar data and used reflectivity values to define both colour and intensity of the 3D points. I spent

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Visualisation of LINZ elevation data using Blender

Andrew Tyrrell has used LINZ LIDAR data to create a crisp map with detailed shadows where the elevation changes. If you’re interested in this effect then check out the go-to tutorial on the technique by Daniel Huffman. Playing#wip #b3d #cartography @LINZLDS pic.

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Historic sea ice extents

This hypnotic map by John Nelson shows the seasonal ebb and flow of sea ice as it freezes and thaws over the past 40 years. He also looks at alternative methods of visualising the same data to explore how sea-ice extents have changed in