GIS & Solar Eclipses

Solar eclipses are pretty neat. Even neater is being able to track past and future eclipses from any location in the world. You might be thinking, "Such technology cannot possibly be readily available for my consumption!" Luckily for you, there is a GIS map that lets you see over 600 years' worth of solar eclipses with just the click of a mouse!

The Solar Eclipse Finder gives you access to past and future solar eclipse occurrences by clicking anywhere on the map. With simple color coding (teal for past, orange for future), you can see locations with high eclipse frequency and others with none at all.

Clicking on any of the colored bands will give you information on the type, date, time, duration, size, and even more information about the solar eclipse. Where the band touches indicates where that solar eclipse will be able to be seen.

If you're curious to know if your hometown might have a solar eclipse in its future, simply click on the map! Thanks to GIS capabilities, this information is easy to access and visually intuitive.

GIS & Clean Streets

Los Angeles is getting street clean-up help for the entire city, street by street, with the use of GIS capabilities. LA's mayor, Eric Garcetti, has started a Clean Streets Initiative that entails driving every single street in LA and giving the block a "cleanliness score" from 1-3 (1=Clean, 2=Somewhat Clean, 3=Not Clean). This practice puts LA as a leader in the US, as it's the only large city conducting a regular cleanliness assessment of every city street.

Once each street is assigned a number, the City is broken up into grids to help the Bureau of Sanitation strategically deploy resources to areas, such as a new dedicated Clean Streets clean-up crew. Clicking on any grid will tell you the area, and the average score of the streets within the grid.

  

Using this information, the City can indicate areas of the most need, like making sure there are clean routes to school, preventing illegal dumping hotspots, and deploying trash bins in litter-heavy areas.