The nature of water: unveiling the most detailed view of water on Earth | Hacker News Reader

The nature of water: unveiling the most detailed view of water on Earth

blog.google

74 pointsDiabloD38 comments

Don't you love those days when you want to cry as someone copies what you've done on a larger data set and gets it into Nature.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425715...

http://www.ga.gov.au/interactive-maps/#/theme/water/map/wofs

I'm guessing you're the third author on that paper? How does what Google did differ from what you did, apart from scale? At least they cited you, right... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, at least we got a quick cite. I believe they had to sacrifice a bit on the rigour of the methodology to be able to do it at scale. For example, atmospheric correction of the data, methodology, validation, ...

We've also improved a lot on our methodology since our own paper was published (using more sophisticated classification algorithms, for example).

Not too fussed, I've got a lot more cool stuff in the pipeline...

Frustrating, but your work still counts and matters.

Thanks.

I just do the work because it's fun, that's the rewarding part for me. I just like to wander around working on random "mathy" pure and applied problems in a variety of areas...

I wonder if anyone has done the same kind of analysis on groundwater / well-water reservoirs.

I wish there was a simple way to combine different sources of map data to produce new visualizations. This is the 21st century, maps should be as easy to make as memes! Are there standard formats? Where would one even begin?

How would they? That's the kind of thing that does not show up on satellite images, and would need to be collected / collated through manual measurements. I'm sure the data is there, at least in some parts of the world, but it's not as accessible as satellite images, since it requires access to local / country-specific data.

Very interesting data set! I'll have to download it when I get back to my computer and take a look.

One thing that bothers me is that the language used seems to be somewhat alarmist about loss of water, when the real problem is much more complex and the surface area of water is actually growing. Maybe it's a nitpick but I think alarmist language can tend to prevent people from taking an honest look at important data.

Side note, I've been looking for a map of the world's fresh water that I can plug into Google Earth. This may contain that data, I'll have to check, but is anyone aware of related datasets that I could use to find things like bodies of fresh water in deciduous forests, for example?

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