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MapBox Streets in Español + Français

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MapBox Streets is now also available in Spanish and French, in addition to English and local languages. Just click on the “customize” tab to pick your language!


San Francisco State of the Map T-Shirt

Tibetan Plateau: Jewel Toned Lakes #CloudlessAtlas

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The Tibetan Plateau. The plateau itself is covered in irregular hills, and its western half has no river drainage, so rainfall forms large lakes. They are called jewel-toned lakes for the colors of the minerals that collect in them. In this Cloudless Atlas imagery we see them uninterrupted by clouds and image seams, just as bright as they are in real life.

This view covers an enormous region of south-central Asia, about the same area as the contiguous United States. We’re looking at the highest area in the world, the Tibetan plateau. It’s raised by the collision of the Indian subcontinent into Asia – a process that’s been happening for 40 million years so far and has created what geologists believe may be the largest plateau in earth’s history. Its southern edge is the Himalaya range, including Mount Everest (near the centerline of this view), which is still rising by several millimeters per year. On its northwest, it borders the Taklamakan desert, a huge sea of sand dunes visible as a bright oval. At the eastern edge of the Taklamakan is Lop Nur, a famously inhospitable lakebed where China conducted nuclear-weapons testing. Along the bottom right of this view, the plateau merges with the Southeast Asian highlands.

Photos from Open Government Happy Hour

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On Friday, we hosted an Open Government happy hour in the MapBox Garage to kick off Transparency Camp 2013, an unconference organized by The Sunlight Foundation. Over 200 of our friends from across the open government and open data spaces joined us for beers and empanadas. Check out a few of our favorite photos from the event below, and be sure to check out the full album on flickr.

Dave, Will, and Alex hanging out in the foreground; Ansis, Young, and Tom standing off to the left

Young puts on his game face while Mike calls for help

The garage fills as partygoers roll in

We got lucky with the weather, so the big garage doors stayed open all night

The MapBox foosball tables

Young and Will watch real-time OpenStreetMap edits

View the full album on flickr.

Vector Tiles Preview: Designing the World with TileMill2

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A peek over AJ’s shoulder while he uses an early internal preview of TileMill 2, 100% powered by our new vector tile stack developed by Dane, Artem, and Young.

We’re combining TileMill’s deep design control and the worldwide big data of MapBox Streets into a fast, incredibly powerful interface. Now brands can use house fonts on the map, organizations can specify approved international borders, and search companies can integrate their own POIs into the map tiles. This is a major element in our push to make maps the canvas for everything location, and it’s a lot more than just changing colors. It’s about radical customization, and taking cartography to scale.

New Map Editor Launches on OpenStreetMap.org

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Today iD, a modern in-browser map editor, launches on OpenStreetMap.org. This editor is a critical update to OpenStreetMap’s tool set and it is designed to radically improve the first-time editing experience while providing a fast and intuitive interface for anybody mapping on OpenStreetMap.

iD ships with an interactive tutorial, inline help and a much more intuitive UI helping users to map hundreds of distinct features like roads, trails, buildings, parks, cafés, schools and hospitals.

Mapping with OpenStreetMap’s new iD editor

This release is the culmination of a concentrated seven month sprint kicked off together with Richard Fairhurst, creator of both previous web-based OpenStreetMap editors, and supported by a substantial grant from the Knight Foundation. Over the course of this sprint dozens of contributors have chimed in with patches large and small, and the amazing international OpenStreetMap community has translated iD into two dozen languages.

We have written iD from the ground up in Javascript using state of the art libraries like D3 and having reuse in mind. The code is open source, allowing for unrestricted reuse in any other software project. Our intention is not only to radically improve editing on OpenStreetMap.org, but also to lay the groundwork for a new generation of fast in-browser tools in OpenStreetMap.

Using alpha and beta releases of iD, OpenStreetMap users have made a quarter million individual changes to OpenStreetMap in nearly 8,000 changesets. The development team has been busy too: since the beta1 release, we have focused on getting the editor rock solid, optimizing its performance to ensure the editing experience feels snappy, and preparing it for embedding on OpenStreetMap.org. Now that we’ve reached this milestone, we’ll move quickly to address any important issues that surface from iD’s increased userbase and then turn our attention to interesting new features:

  • Support for displaying and editing route relations and turn restrictions
  • Compatibility with iPad and other tablet devices
  • Integrating with OpenStreetMap’s new map notes feature
  • Custom UI bundles (presets), for regional or task-specific mapping projects (e. g. water wells and refugee camps)
  • Further modularize iD’s core architecture to stoke the creation of more great OSM projects

We are also starting to put our expertise with satellite and aerial imagery to work with some experiments in using automated feature extraction to augment editing sessions.

Take the new editor for a spin and improve the map. Head over to OpenStreetMap and click on “iD” in the edit drop down to get started. For more frequent, in-depth updates from iD development, follow our OSM development blog. To join development or simply provide feedback, head over to GitHub.

More coverage in today’s press

24 Hours of new OpenStreetMap Users

Launching MapBox Earth

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We just launched MapBox Earth, a free and open source iOS app that combines the power of a 3D globe with MapBox’s beautiful maps. It’s also a great starting point to build your own 3D mapping app - we’re cracking the 3D globe software market wide open by releasing the source code and building in the open.

MapBox Earth

MapBox Earth is a universal app optimized for iPhone and iPad and it includes beautiful preloaded layers based off of MapBox Streets, MapBox Terrain, and MapBox Satellite. You can switch the map layer with a single tap and feel the maps right in your hands, in gorgeous and fast 3D.

To create this app, we partnered with mousebird consulting, an expert in the field of 3D maps and the developer of the underlying engine. We’re shining a light on more great open source mapping work that works great with MapBox.

Grab MapBox Earth on the App Store or browse the source code on GitHub!


Spotting Deforestation from Space – in Madagascar

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This is the lower Mangoky river, southwest Madagascar, as seen with the EVI2 vegetation index as derived from data collected by NASA’s MODIS sensors in 2011 and 2012. To the south of the river’s mouth, you can see Lake Ihotry shrink in 2012. It’s been on a downward trend for a few years, and at the end of 2012’s dry season it almost disappeared for a few weeks. North of the delta, some dark areas appear – deforestation. The largest of them (just south of the second largest river in our view, Maintapaka) is about 6.5 km (4 mi) on a side, or roughly half the area of Manhattan.

If you look closely, you may also see the course of the Mangoky river shift very slightly around an island in its delta. The Mangoky is full of soil that’s washed off deforested upstream hillsides, and it’s constantly filling its streambed with silt. In fact, in maps only a few decades old, you can find that it used to flow due northwest out of its delta, many miles north of today’s course.

We are trying to make it easier to quickly communicate complex environmental issues. This post is an early look at how we’re thinking about investing in our analytical stack at MapBox.

Developing an analytical stack

Producing clear satellite imagery analysis is traditionally very complicated. First there’s the trouble of accessing large data sets, and then there’s the difficulty of working with tools (both software and hardware) with the power to crank through big data. The power of a clear, data-driven story on a map is huge, but for a long time it simply too hard. We’re turning our cloud expertise into tools to help make analysis easier. Some of this comes naturally out of our cloudless imagery work, one of the most common patterns we notice is – unfortunately – deforestation. Sometimes it’s very clear, as in the Amazon rainforest in the state of Pará, Brazil:

ParáCloudless Atlas with OpenStreetMap borders and labels.

Small roads branching to the north and south off the Trans-Amazonian Highway around Uruará are each surrounded by clearings. This zipper or herringbone pattern is clear in much of the Amazon basin, and in the Congo basin of central Africa. Luckily, space-based analysis by organizations like NASA, the World Resources Institute, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), and InfoAmazonia (who we’ve been proud to work with!) has supported regulatory changes that are slowing this type of deforestation in most areas.

As I worked on some of our tools and processes, I looked for regions where deforestation would be harder to spot with the unaided eye. One of the most interesting is the island of Madagascar, which has unusual vegetation and an especially serious environmental crisis. Here’s an overview of Madagascar and neighboring islands in the visible spectrum:

Madagascar and environs

Cloudless Atlas with OpenStreetMap borders and labels.

As you might guess from the mix of colors, there’s a lot of environmental variation. The World Wildlife Fund lists four major ecosystems on the island: dry deciduous forests along the west and north, lowland forests on the east coast, succulent woodlands in the southwest, and subhumid forests in the central uplands. It can be hard to tell what you’re looking at in the complicated patterns of topography, settlement, and land use – yellow might be healthy in a scrubland, for example, but a sign of serious problems in a forest.

To get a more quantitative view of the situation, I used EVI2 again, the vegetation index I used last week to look at the effects of forest fires. Within limits, it’s a powerful indicator of relative plant thickness. Here’s Madagascar’s EVI2 in every quarter from 2009 through 2012:

some

Madagascar’s rainy season is November through April, which you can see reflected in higher growth in the first half of the each year, when plants have more water. Reading down the columns, there’s year-on-year variation from weather and climate. These can interact dangerously with a complicated political situation: after a crisis in 2009, itself driven partly by conflicts over land use, foreign aid suspensions combined with a drought led to hunger. A period of lax environmental enforcement allowed a boom in illegal logging of rosewood and other trees in high demand for the international luxury trade. Such big events are often visible at the regional level with techniques like difference overlays, but for me it’s sometimes the details that are most interesting. That animation again:

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You’ll see more of this kind of work on Twitter (@MapBox) in the coming weeks. Feel free to talk to me (@vruba) or Chris (@hrwgc) on the satellite team to get into more specifics.

Vector Tiles for MapBox Streets

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MapBox has developed an open source vector format to power the future of our web maps. Vector tiles rethink web maps from the ground up, providing a single efficient format to power raster tiles, interactive features, geojson streams, mobile renderers, and much more.

The MapBox team quietly started powering MapBox Streets, our worldwide base map, with vector tiles several months ago. Now with hundreds of millions of map views across thousands of subscribers, the stability and scalability wins are clear. We want to share our vision for where we are taking vector tiles and what this means for the future direction of MapBox.

MapBox has developed an open source vector format to power the future of our web maps. Vector tiles rethink web maps from the ground up, providing a single efficient format to power raster tiles, interactive features, geojson streams, mobile renderers, and much more.

The MapBox team quietly started powering MapBox Streets, our worldwide base map, with vector tiles several months ago. Now with hundreds of millions of map views across thousands of subscribers, the stability and scalability wins are clear. We want to share our vision for where we are taking vector tiles and what this means for the future direction of MapBox.

Hand-drawn Paris in Pencil

Shinjuku is even more exciting in Comic Map!

Ships sail the seas in Pirates Return

DC is a little different in Zombie World

Incredible styling

In addition to developing this new vector tile format, we have rebuilt our entire platform to have vector tiles at its core. TileMill, our open source design studio, is going to relaunch with vector tiles fully integrated to be a powerhouse tool for custom cartography. Design iterations can happen in seconds and be applied to a full global vector tileset without lengthy downloads, imports, or time spent tuning database queries. In short, anyone will be able to make a totally custom branded map, of the entire globe, that is lighting fast on every device. Removing traditional bottlenecks from the creative process has allowed our cartographer AJ Ashton to give us a glimpse of what's to come.

Watch AJ Ashton design a map in the new TileMill 2

One format

Our format defines a protobuf schema that can pack layers, geometries, and feature attributes from any datasource into individual vector tiles. Once converted, the original datasource—shapefile, geojson, postgis database—is no longer necessary. Paired with a renderer like the super fast Mapnik and a CartoCSS stylesheet, vector tiles can be rendered as images, UTFGrids, geojson, and more. And the possibilities are wide open for rendering directly on mobile devices or in the browser.

Star mapnik-vector-tile on GitHub

Perfect for OpenStreetMap

Vector tiles are designed to leverage the global scale of trillions of local details in OpenStreetMap. Additional OSM tags allow map labels to be switched between multiple languages on the fly. And vector tiles can easily handle the rapid rate of updates to OSM. Edits to the map show up on MapBox Streets and any custom styles within a matter of minutes.

Start editing OpenStreetMap in iD
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    <h1 class='centered'>Big world, small footprint</h1>
    <p>Our vector tile-powered MapBox Streets dataset is highly optimized, slim enough to fit the entire world onto a single USB stick. By packing detailed data into lower zoom levels, vector tiles allow the highest zoom levels to be rendered at a fraction of the storage cost of raster tiles. Vector tiles point toward a radically more custom mapping future for mobile and offline applications that can cache more efficiently and render indefinitely from the same slim dataset.</p>
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Get in touch

We're sprinting right now on the new TileMill 2, and aim to have this in your hands in just months. Our work is happening entirely in the open on GitHub. While we can't promise timely support until the first beta release, we also won't be discouraging lurkers.

Get in touch if you have a special use case for vector tiles—custom styles, offline or mobile maps, custom rendering, or more. We're working with a handful of select partners on advancing this exciting technology and you may be the next.

— May 13 2013
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    <h3>About Young Hahn</h3>
      <div class='author-image' style='background-image:url(/img/team/young.thumb.jpg);'>&nbsp;</div>
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    <a href='/about/team/#young-hahn'>Young Hahn</a>
      
  leads the MapBox engineering team with a breadth of experience building practical, functional, and beautiful applications.
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<a href='https://twitter.com/younghahn' class='twitter-follow-button' data-show-count='false' data-show-screen-name='true' data-lang='en'>Follow @younghahn</a>
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tweets mention this blog post.Tweet this article  
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Users editing OSM worldwide with iD

Huge MapBox Satellite Update: Cloudless Atlas + US & EU Aerial + OpenStreetMap Minutely Updates

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As Wired and FastCo just reported, we’ve pushed a huge update to MapBox Satellite today. Not only did we just launch our new Cloudless Atlas imagery for the entire world (down through zoom level 8), we also launched new aerial imagery for the entire US and EU down to zoom level 19. Everything is traceable in OpenStreetMap, and now any edits to OpenStreetMap show up on MapBox within 5 minutes. This tight feedback loop is letting us map the world in real time - all in the open.

Charlie Loyd walking though the processing algorithms used to map Cloudless Atlas.

“This is what the world looks like to an astronaut on a cloudless day: new technology lets you see satellite images of the Earth with a clarity you’ve never seen before, and reveals massive changes to our landscape that used to be hard to see.” - Ariel Schwartz, Senior Editor at FastCo

Explore your world, Cloud-free

Italy, with Tunisia to the south and the Balkans to the east

Angola and Zambia, with subtle but clear changes visible between different landscapes

The southern coast of South Africa, with the Cape of Good Hope in the southwest

Beaufort Sea and Amundsen Gulf, Canada, showing the varied natural colors of the tundra

Australia – red desert in the Outback and green forests in areas with more rain

Cloud-free Basemap Ready to be Customized

MapBox users with Basic-level accounts and higher can now apply MapBox’s rich customization and styling options to our new Cloudless Atlas layer to create custom cloud-free base maps, including our recently announced French and Spanish label names for MapBox Streets.

AWS User Group Road Trip

Q&A: City Guides by National Geographic

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Today’s release of the gorgeous City Guides by National Geographic mobile app showcases the perfect marriage of expansive content, a high level of attention to detail and polish, and the flexibility of MapBox’s platform, all in one package.

We recently got in touch with Jess Elder, Senior Product Manager at National Geographic, as well as Thomas Cooke, Ben Cline, and Adam Luptak at Rally Interactive, the talented shop behind the app, for a little Q&A about the app, its development, and their use of MapBox along the way.

MapBox: Tell us about the app and why you made it.

Cooke: The app essentially provides travel planning content and utility features for four of the world’s most iconic cities – London, Paris, Rome, and New York – and is based on a series of award-winning guidebooks that National Geographic has been publishing for years.

There are plenty of features and content for users to get a feel for what the app has to offer. Users can then purchase individual guides loaded with insider content from National Geographic’s editorial team like What to Do, Food Scene recommendations, Secrets, and more.

Maps are of course essential to the experience. We made this app in a partnership with National Geographic and started working on it shortly after we launched last year’s National Parks by National Geographic.


“Being able to customize map tiles with MapBox was crucial in getting the desired outcome.”

- Ben Cline, Rally Interactive


MapBox: Maps are featured really prominently in the app. What were your design goals with adding a map and why did you feel you needed a custom map?

Cooke: Indeed, maps are central to the app. Most of the content and functionality is tied to the map piece. There were a few reasons why we were attracted to MapBox, but it really came down to a mutual decision between us and our partners at National Geographic. Besides being a digital producer, Jess has a background in cartography. The decision to use MapBox goes deeper than just a design decision, but we certainly love the flexibility for custom design.

Cline: We wanted the app to embody a modern look and feel. To accomplish this, we needed to use a muted color palette accented by a couple of highly saturated hues. Being able to customize map tiles with MapBox was crucial in getting the desired outcome.

MapBox: What were the good parts of using the MapBox iOS SDK and what were the hard parts? What about with our hosted map service?

Luptak: Both the greatest strength and biggest challenge was the freedom that the MapBox iOS SDK’s open source nature allowed us. By starting from the release version, we were able to capitalize on the ability to pull customized map tiles from the MapBox service and cache them for offline use, and then build on top of that to achieve the customized interface we wanted with things like custom pins and unorthodox callouts. The combination of the customization tools for map styling and the ability to modify the SDK allowed us to present users with a unique, fully custom map, integrated with the visual style of the app.


“The ability to modify the SDK allowed us to present users with a unique, fully custom map, integrated with the visual style of the app.”

- Adam Luptak, Rally Interactive


MapBox: Anything else about MapBox’s technology or about the app that you’d like to mention?

Elder: Building on National Geographic’s tradition of cartography, photography, and publishing, we seek to meld armchair traveling with functional utility in our apps. With our partners at Rally Interactive, we’ve finally been able to take travel apps to new heights of elegance and quality, while keeping the user experience simple and informative. Coupling National Geographic’s content and storytelling with Rally Interactive’s brilliant design and development atop MapBox’s customizable map tiles and solid service, we feel this app really creates a useful and beautiful utility for the urban traveler.


You can download the app now or, if you’re a developer, you can dive right into our tools and start making beautiful maps today!

Have a great app that you’ve built using MapBox? Get in touch with us or feel free to message me directly on Twitter or App Dot Net.

Inkscape and MapBox for Interactive, Illustrated maps

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We recently relaunched the MapBox product tour, and part of that redesign includes a custom map showing off our server infrastructure:

http://mapbox.com/tour/#section-tech

Even though this map began its life as a vector illustration in Inkscape, it’s actually a fully-functional tile-based slippy map. This allows us to do cool things like add markers based on lat/lon coordinates, and add panning and zooming, that would be impossible with just a static image.

It’s surprisingly easy to do this kind of thing with MapBox. Here’s how I made the map:

  1. I started by importing a screenshot of MapBox Streets at zoom level 2 into Inkscape, to use as a guide, ensuring my illustration will be geo-rectified with latitude and longitude coordinates once I upload it to MapBox.

  2. I started drawing my map with the pen tool in Inkscape, using the screenshot as a guide.

  3. I created a transparent layer on top of my map to define the bounds of the ‘tiles’ I want to export out of Inkscape.

  4. I batch-exported the tile layer out of inkscape, resulting in 256 x 256px png “tiles”.

  5. I ran this shell script, which automatically assembled the PNG tiles into an MBtiles file.

  6. I uploaded the MBtiles file to my MapBox account. It’s now treated like any MapBox map - ready to be shared. Here it is in my account.

  7. Finally, using mapbox.js (and the assisance of Garrett), I added an interactive layer of markers with custom popups. Here’s the end result.

If you’d like to make your own illustrated map with Inkscape and MapBox, here’s a starter kit I put together that includes an Inkscape template and the shell script for assembling your MBtiles file from multiple PNGs. With a bit of experimentation you can do a lot of interesting things with images as maps. For further background, check out Tom MacWright’s blogpost on images as maps.


New York City Happy Hour at Swift Bar

Headed to San Francisco for State of the Map US

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In a little over two weeks many folks on the MapBox team will head to San Francisco for the annual US-based OpenStreetMap conference. We’re gearing up for an interesting and productive trip and are especially looking forward to meeting and exchanging ideas with the 350+ OpenStreetMap users and contributors who will be attending the conference.

With MapBox Streets, our street-level map of the world powered by OpenStreetMap data, we’re invested in improving the map data itself as well as using OpenStreetMap to make beautiful maps. We’ll be talking about our experiences in both areas throughout the conference, and specifically in these sessions:

We’re also participating in several hands on workshops happening on the Friday before the conference (separate registration required). These sessions will walk through OpenStreetMap tools and cartography tricks in greater detail:

We hope these sessions will spark conversations around common experiences and an exchange of ideas. To talk about them or anything about the MapBox stack or what we’re up to, look for our team at the conference and the many social events which we’ll be sure to hit.

State of the Map US is happening on June 8 & 9 in San Francisco. You can check out the full schedule online and registration is still open. See you in San Francisco!

Look for Us @Foss4GNA Today and Tomorrow

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Today and tomorrow, Justin, Tom, AJ, Eric and myself are at Foss4GNA in Minneapolis.

We’re looking forward to two great days of catching up with the open source spatial community and talking about our recent work around vector tiles, Cloudless Atlas, OpenStreetMap editing and open source mobile SDKs.

Each of us is leading sessions, too. Here is where you can find us:

  • Wed, 10.30 AM Shaping OpenStreetMap into Global Basemaps - AJ in St. Croix 1 room
  • Wed, 11.00 AM iD, a New Editor for OpenStreetMap - Tom in Minnesota room
  • Wed, 2.00 PM CartoCSS for Styling Maps - Tom in St. Croix 1 room
  • Wed, 6.00 PM Growing OpenStreetMap Big - Alex at lightning talks
  • Thu, 9.00 AM Keynote: Open By Default - Open Source @MapBox - Eric
  • Thu, 10.30 AM Building a Mobile, Offline Mapping Stack using Open Tools and Data - Justin in St. Croix 1 room

You can find the full program on the Foss4GNA web site. Catch us at any of these talks, or in the breaks. Tweet at us @MapBox if you can’t find us in the crowd.

Capturing the Impact of the Oklahoma Tornado

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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, 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.

Before & After of the Moore, OK Tornado

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Thanks to open aerial imagery provided by the U.S. Government and our MapBox.js javascript library, we can now see -- in stunning high resolution -- the impact of Monday's tornado on the city of Moore, Oklahoma.

Using the latest aerial photography captured by the Department of Homeland Security in support of the Moore Tornado recovery and response efforts, and released with an open license, and our MapBox Satellite global mosaic baselayer, with aerial photography down to zoom level 19, we created a before and after map revealing the impact of the Moore Tornado.

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    <h1>Before & After of the Moore, OK Tornado</h1>

    <p>Thanks to open aerial imagery provided by the U.S. Government and our <a href="http://mapbox.com/mapbox.js/">MapBox.js</a> javascript library, we can now see -- in stunning high resolution -- <a href="http://www.mapbox.com/labs/oklahoma-aerial/#13/35.3255/-97.5130">the impact of Monday's tornado</a> on the city of Moore, Oklahoma. </p>

    <p>Using the latest aerial photography captured by the <a href="http://www.dhs.gov/">Department of Homeland Security</a> in support of the Moore Tornado recovery and response efforts, and released with an open license, and our <a href="http://www.mapbox.com/blog/mapbox-satellite/">MapBox Satellite</a> global mosaic baselayer, with aerial photography down to zoom level 19, we <a href="http://www.mapbox.com/labs/oklahoma-aerial/#13/35.3255/-97.5130">created a before and after map revealing the impact of the Moore Tornado</a>.</p>

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We're releasing this openly for the public good. Embed the map on your own site using the embed code below:

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    <h3>About Chris Herwig</h3>
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  <small>
  
    <a href='/about/team/#chris-herwig'>Chris Herwig</a>
      
  leads the Satellite team at MapBox, where he acquires and processes the source imagery that powers MapBox Satellite and other analytical products.
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