Friday, July 15, 2005
Nuclear blasts on Google Maps
Eric Meyer has produced an interesting, if slightly bugged application of Google Maps with his HYDESim maps which are an indicator of structural damage to buildings from a nuclear blast.
The maps show rings of overpressure caused by the blast - which is unfortunately where they go wrong. Google Maps do not have the same scale both vertically and horizontally, so these rings should really be ellipses. The error is not too bad in much of the mid-USA, but moving further North or South the errors mount up, and switching to satellite mode the difference can be even greater. For example at -96.24298095703125, 63.87451171875 on the satellite image the ratio between the vertical and horizontal scales is roughly 23:10.
The maps show rings of overpressure caused by the blast - which is unfortunately where they go wrong. Google Maps do not have the same scale both vertically and horizontally, so these rings should really be ellipses. The error is not too bad in much of the mid-USA, but moving further North or South the errors mount up, and switching to satellite mode the difference can be even greater. For example at -96.24298095703125, 63.87451171875 on the satellite image the ratio between the vertical and horizontal scales is roughly 23:10.
# posted by zmarties @ 7/15/2005 08:13:00 am 
