SkyTruth Alerts is better than ever. Learn how to make our new Alerts work for you.

SkyTruth’s new Alerts app is a year old! Or, in human terms, our new Alerts is in early childhood, a period of tremendous growth across all areas of development with occasional wobbles and stumbles.

SkyTruth Alerts show subscribers and users where environmental incidents have occurred in their Areas of Interest (AOIs), particularly for oil and gas activities. In making Alerts available to the public — at no charge — SkyTruth has provided access to tools, data and satellite imagery that environmentalists and citizen-scientists otherwise wouldn’t have. You can learn more about SkyTruth Alerts here.

In 2018, we gave Alerts a facelift and SkyTruth began looking for additional datasets that would help subscribers monitor their AOI. We’ve expanded oil and gas permitting to include West Virginia, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Montana and Utah. We’ve also added pollution alerts for Florida, New Mexico and New York. (If you’d like to see more datasets, let us know!)

The new Alerts was developed to meet three goals:

• Provide users access to satellite imagery;
• Give users the ability to create, annotate and share their own custom maps;
• Enable a quicker process for adding new Alert data sources.

Whether you’re a longtime Alerts subscriber or are just starting out, here are seven features you might have missed.

1. Drawing Setback Distances Around an Alert

While Alerts incidents are generally tied to a specific point on a map, they can also greatly affect the surrounding areas. Alerts helps highlight these areas of impact by letting you define setback distances around an incident. (For example, you may get an Alert that your state government has issued a permit to drill and frack a new gas well in your AOI, and you want to create a map showing the 2500-foot zone of potential public health risk around that drilling site.)

Start by viewing the full details of an incident, either by clicking on an incident from an Alerts email, or when navigating the map by clicking an Alert icon, followed by the View Full Report link from the pop-up window.

You’ll find the Draw setbacks link at the top of the left sidebar. After clicking this link:

1. Select a unit of measure (meter, km, mile).
2. Select a distance.
3. Click Draw.
4. Repeat as necessary.

2. Navigating by Latitude/Longitude

Just like every house has its own address (house number, name of the street, city, etc), every point on the surface of earth can be specified by its own latitude and longitude coordinates. Sometimes, a latitude/longitude is all you have. Fortunately the Alerts Location Search box — located on the upper-right corner of the map — will accept these coordinates just as well as a city, state, or house address.

Try it out by on the Alerts Map by seeing where these latitude/longitude coordinates take you:

• 36.0986, -112.1107
• 30, -90

Wondering what the latitude/longitude is for where you are on the Alerts map? If you use a mouse or touchpad, Alerts will always show you the lat/lng for the current location of the pointer. You’ll find these coordinates on the right side of the heading, just under the Login link.

3. Search Alerts by Keyword and Time Period

Alerts has about 420,000 incidents in its database. The primary method for narrowing these down to the ones you’re interested in is by moving around the map, zooming in and out, and creating AOIs. You’ll always see the most recent 100 incidents on your current map.

Looking for a specific incident can seem impossible without the additional filtering that Alerts provides:

• Start and end dates: Enter either or both dates. Results are shown automatically when completing each date.
• Keyword: Alerts will search all incidents in the current map boundaries for the keyword you enter here. Keyword search is not case sensitive, so TAYLOR and taylor will return the same results. However, the incident must contain your typed keyword(s) with exactly the same spelling, spacing and syntax.

Click the  when you’re finished typing the search keyword.

Some of the uses of this feature include searching incidents for a specific owner, address, material, well number (for oil and gas permits), or description. Also, many Alerts sources use special keywords to identify incidents. For example, we add the keyword BIGSPILL for spills over 100 gallons reported to the National Response Center, and for spills that we estimate are bigger than 100 gallons. Essentially, any words you see while viewing an incident can be used to search for similar incidents.

Some examples:

• ALLEGHENY POWER
• TAYLOR ENERGY
• SHEEN
• AMMONIA
• PIPELINE
• INCINERATOR
• SEATTLE
• 063-37531
• BIGSPILL
• CRUDE

4. Download the Data to Analyze for yourself

Once you’ve got the map positioned just so, with the map boundaries and zoom level showing the area you’re interested in and any required filtering applied, you can take a closer look at the data and even download a CSV or KML file.

Start by clicking the Table view/Download icon, located on the Alerts tab:

You’re presented with a spreadsheet-like view of the data:

Here are some of the capabilities you’ll have:

• Show top 20,000 alerts: check to show the most recent 20,000 instead of 100 incidents. [Update 8 May 2020: We’ve increased the number from 2,000 to 20000.]
• Download KML File: KML files are used in an Earth browser such as Google Earth to layer the incidents visually on a map outside of Alerts.
• Download CSV File: CSV files can be opened by spreadsheets or viewed in text editors.
• Previous and Next buttons take you through the data, page by page.
• 20 rows dropdown list: allows you to change the number of incidents per page, up to 100.
• Click on any column header (Id, Title, Incident Date, etc.) to sort on that column. Click again to sort in descending sequence.
• Pull the vertical bars between column headings to increase/decrease the width of a column.

5. Play a Visualization of How Many Alerts Occurred Over Time

Before running this timeline, position the map with the boundaries and zoom level you want and apply any required filtering.  Start by clicking the Timeline link on the Alerts tab:

Alerts will create annual counts of incidents. Try running the visualization by clicking the Play button:

From here, you’ll have controls to adjust the visualization:

• Define how long each step represents (defaults to 1 year): Can select 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12, or 24 months.
• Define how long each step lasts (defaults to 1 second)
• Select Marker plot or Heat map (defaults to Marker plot): The marker plot visualization will place a marker on the map for each alert; a heat map uses a warm-to-cool color spectrum to show where the incidents are most concentrated.
• Select a date range (begin and end month/year)
• Clear markers after each step, or not. If you don’t clear markers after each step, the map will represent a sum of incidents for the current step and and all prior steps.
• Cluster markers, or not. For marker plots, you can cluster the incidents together instead of showing individual markers. Clustering provides a count of incidents in relative proximity to each other.

You must be logged into Alerts to use the remaining features in this post, making you a SkyTruth Alerts super-user!

6. Measure an Area on the Map

Navigate to any AOI on the map. You may want to switch to the Satellite basemap for a better view of the area. You’ll find basemap selection in the upper-middle section of the map:

Look for something you want to measure, such as a body of water, housing development, industrial complex, or agricultural field.

Start by clicking the Annotations icon , which opens the Annotations window:

There’s a lot to explore here, but for this exercise click the polygon icon  to start identifying the area you want to measure. You’ll find on-screen help in the Annotations window. In short, you start the measurement by clicking anywhere on the map, then use additional clicks to create new lines around the area you’re measuring. Complete the polygon by clicking the original starting point.

When finished, you’ll have these options:

By checking the Include area checkbox, Alerts will measure and display the selected area in square kilometers.

7. Share a Map Image

Create your custom map — any map! Select the alerts, basemaps, satellite imagery, layers, and annotations you want to show. When the map is ready to share, click the Share icon:

Then click the Download image of map button:

The image that’s downloaded will be a JPG file and can be found where your browser stores downloaded files. It will have a filename starting with skytruthalertsmap followed by the date and time. This is an experimental feature in Alerts and we would appreciate any feedback on its use.

Conclusion:

Alerts is becoming one of the go-to applications in an environmentalist’s toolbox. Soon, you’ll be able to create your own Issue Maps so that you can focus on the area, data, and map controls relevant to a specific topic. We also have high hopes for User Generated Alerts, planned for later in 2020, so you can show the world what’s happening in the places you care about. Stay tuned for new features in the year to come!