Thursday, April 18, 2013

China turns down India's proposal for joint mechanism on Brahmaputra - The New Indian Express

I feel a connection to the Brahmaputra River. In 1995, my husband and I visited Assam and even took a rafting trip on one of the Brahmputra's tributaries.  In 1998, I had the privilege of going to Tibet, where I traveled along the Yarlung Tsangpo River, as the river is known in its upper reaches.  Water issues concerning the river basin have since been of interest to me.

As I wrote in a previous post, Brahma Chellaney dedicated a whole chapter on the Tibetan Plateau in his book  Water: Asia's New Battleground.  He also discussed China's unwillingness to participate in transnational water commissions or international agreements.  It should come as no surprise then that China turns down India's proposal for joint mechanism on Brahmaputra.
The Ganges Brahmaputra River Basin area was created from the data set Hydrological basins in Southeast Asia.

The majority of the linework of the map was obtained by delineating drainage basin boundaries from hydrologically corrected elevation data with a resolution of 15 arc-seconds. The elevation dataset was part of a mapping product, HydroSHEDS, developed by the Conservation Science Program of World Wildlife Fund. Original input data had been obtained during NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). Areas north of the SRTM extent, 60 degrees N, were obtained by merging with the HYDRO1k basin layer.

You may download a JPEG, PDF, or ArcMap document of the Ganges Brahmaputra River Basin.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

India earthquake zone map


This map was creating by warping or rectifying a non-georeferenced map to Google Maps. The source (before warping or rectification) of the earthquake zone map is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:India_earthquake_zone_map_en.svg (reference article:Earthquake hazard zoning of India). Warping or rectification was done through Harvard's World Map Warper. Control points:

  • Kolkata 
  • New Delhi 
  • Mumbai 
  • Chennai 
  • Srinagar 
  • Thiruvananthapuram 
  • Guhawati

To view the warped map (as KML) in Google Maps, go to https://maps.google.com/?q=http://warp.worldmap.harvard.edu/maps/1722.kml.

Tuesday, April 09, 2013

Map of projected population in #India 2015


Here is a map that I created that shows projected population in India in 2015.  The data comes from the Population Count Grid, Future Estimates of the Gridded Population of the World, Version 3 (GPWv3). Future Estimates consists of estimates of human population for the years 2005, 2010, and 2015 by 2.5 arc-minute grid cells and associated data sets dated circa 2000. For more information, view the metadata.

As with my other maps, I created this map using Esri ArcMap 10. Each 2.5-min cell contains a value of the estimated population for that area in 2015.   I have overlayed the population layer on top of the Ganges-Brahmaputra River Basin layer.

Unfortunately, I was not able to create a legend for this map. I have shared an ArcMap document (.mxd), a PDF file, and JPEG image via Google Drive. By selecting the population layer in the .mxd file and using the identification arrow, you can find out the population for that 2.5-min cell..

Citation:

Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN)/Columbia University, United Nations Food and Agriculture Programme (FAO), and Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT). 2005. Gridded Population of the World, Version 3 (GPWv3): Population Count Grid, Future Estimates. Palisades, NY: NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/gpw-v3-population-count-future-estimates. Accessed 09 April 2013.