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 followers know that we generated a lot of momentum in 2019, laying the groundwork for major impact in 2020. Here’s a quick list of some of our most important projects underway for the new year: stopping oil pollution at sea, protecting wildlife, identifying poorly reclaimed mine sites, characterizing harmful algal blooms from space, and revealing fossil fuel drilling on public lands.
Last month, an article in MIT Technology Review described strange GPS anomalies in Shanghai. I began investigating, and have now found evidence of a novel form of GPS manipulation occurring at at least 20 sites on the Chinese coast during the past year.
Three women shared their stories with a group of journalists and others attending the Society of Environmental Journalists 2019 meeting in Fort Collins, Colorado last month. Fort Collins sits right next to Weld County – the most prolific county in Colorado for oil and gas production and among the most prolific in the entire United States. There, hydraulic fracturing (mostly for oil) has boomed, along with a population surge that is gobbling up farmland and converting open space into subdivisions. Often, these two very different types of development occur side-by-side.
SkyTruth has updated its Annual Flare Volume map to include 2017 and 2018 data. SkyTruth’s map allows users to search the data by virtually any geographic area they’re interested in, then easily compare and download flare volume totals from 2012 through 2018 to observe trends.