Globe Viewer

Renders the globe in different ways using WebGL (Live Demo). Uses fixed data sources for now, though this is meant as a base for visualizations that add other data sets.

Installing and Running

Requires:

• a recent version of nodejs and yarn
• topojson (yarn global add topojson)
• ImageMagick

To install, clone the repo and download and prepare the data (this may take a few minutes):

yarn install
yarn make-vectors
yarn process-images

To run:

yarn start

The viewer should now be available at http://localhost:3333

Data Sources

Land color (app/assets/data/color-*)

Natural Earth Cross Blended Hypsometry http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10m-cross-blend-hypso/cross-blended-hypso/

Topography and bathymetry (app/assets/data/topo-bathy-*)

Blue Marble http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_cat.php?categoryID=1484

Night Sky Lights (app/assets/data/lights-*)

Blue Marble http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_cat.php?categoryID=1484

Land, Ocean, Rivers, and Borders (app/assets/data/vectors.json)

Natural Earth Physical Vectors http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/50m-physical-vectors/

These physical vectors can be downloaded and processed using ./scripts/make-vectors.sh The resulting json is then drawn to an offscreen canvas in the browser using vectorLayer.js

Other Globe Visualizations / Platforms on the Web

https://github.com/dataarts/webgl-globe

https://cesiumjs.org/

https://earth.nullschool.net/

http://hint.fm/wind/

http://alteredqualia.com/xg/examples/earth_bathymetry.html

http://alteredqualia.com/xg/examples/earth_seasons.html