Natural gas flares spotted from space

Wow...this is a really cool post on Jamais Cascio's blog about a project funded by the World Bank, using data from the National Geophysicial Data Center to measure natural gas flaring -- the release and burning of natural gas released during oil drilling. The project hopes to identify prominent flaring sites (as a precursor to working toward a reduction in flaring) by analyzing nightime satellite imagery! It's possible to tease the data out of imagery using knowledge of the phenomenon and data crunching techniques. Fascinating.

Jamais links to a longer post by Ethan Zuckerman, which describes the project in more detail. Both pages also have gorgeous data maps of the results. I love this stuff, both because of the beauty of the maps (I LOVE maps), and the powerful visualization.

Thanks for the link, Jamais!

posted by Ken Kennedy at Nov 12th 2007 11:00 p.m.