We touch the weather app and can instantly see advanced radar imagery of storms coming in. Your weather app’s screen has a little-noticed function: It will show you radar imagery for the last hour or two. It will also show you radar imagery for theMaps are the original data visualization tool. Going back 25 centuries, maps have shown what the seacoast looks like, where fortifications are, where the taxable property is.
Now you have a map that shows not just where high-speed internet access is missing, but who is disadvantaged by the gap.
As recently as 2015, it would have taken months of marketing and demographic research to try to answer those questions. And the resulting PDF map might have been out of date before it was finished.fills those information gaps. It can be created in less than an hour. It can be continuously updated with fresh data on EV sales, on the traffic patterns of EVs, on evolving rules for government subsidies.
That means decisions on how to tackle problems can be made more quickly too, because we’re not waiting weeks or months just to understand a problem.t’s astonishing to have a familiar tool — a map — become so powerful, so insightful, so adaptable. Last fall, the Biden Administration rolled out an example of exactly this kind of problem-solving map. It’s called CMRA,. CMRA can show how vulnerable any location in the U.S. is to the impact of climate change — drought, flooding, wildfires, extreme heat. It layers on data about people by age and race and population density. It layers on infrastructure that might be in the path of climate disasters — right down to street level.