Capturing the Impact of the Oklahoma Tornado
We’ve partnered with USA Today to visualize the impact of Monday’s tornado in Oklahoma. The Civil Air Patrol conducted flyovers, capturing aerial images immediately after the storm. The images captured were different from traditional vertical aerial photography and weren’t fully georeferenced, meaning creating a mosaic basemap wasn’t feasible.
Instead, we took a different approach to navigating the rapid response imagery — the images, previously only available piecemeal on the USGS HDDS website, are displayed on the map as markers. The markers track the Civil Air Patrol flightpath, and specific markers represent the location of the camera as it captured the image, rather than the location of the image itself.
To give context to the power of this most recent tornado, we layered in previous tornado tracks using data provided by Weather Decision Technologies. The 1999 Bridge Creek-Moore Tornado and the 2003 Moore Tornado can both be toggled on for comparison. The colors in the tornado tracks represent the [Enhanced Fujita Scale][4], also known as EF-Scale, which is an indicator of tornado intensity.
The basemap uses our MapBox Satellite layer, including aerial photography captured by Digital Globe.
The map was built in just a few hours using MapBox.js and the Leaflet.markercluster plugin. See the map live at USA Today.
