Robert Simmon

A portion of the first light image from IkonosF
Robert Simmon

From Space to Story in Data Journalism

The launch of Ikonos was one of a handful of developments that allowed newsrooms to expand from reporting on rocket launches and satellite hardware, to using remote sensing data as an essential tool to help tell stories.
Photograph of "Electricity generated or demanded in Manchester, 1951–1954." This type of visualization is known as a "load model", which represents power consumption in three dimensions. Each day is represented as a piece of cardboard, with the top edge of the cardboard cut away to form a column chart with the height of each column representing electricity demand over 30 minutes. The daily cards are stacked tightly together, so the tops create a 3-dimensional surface that indicates power usage over several years.T
Robert Simmon

The Power Behind Physical, 3-D Visualizations

How 3-D representations offer a quicker and deeper understanding of our world than symbols or abstractions in 2-D visualizations.
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Robert Simmon

Making Sense of Satellite Data, An Open Source Workflow: 2. Pre-processing Data with QGIS

There is more satellite data available now than ever before, but it still takes a little bit of work to convert the raw data into..
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Robert Simmon

Making Sense of Satellite Data, An Open Source Workflow: Accessing Data

We are living in a golden age of access to information about our home planet. Just twenty years ago, access to satellite data was limited..