Wow…this is a really cool post on Jamais Cascio’s blog about a project funded by the World Bank, using data from the National Geophysicial Data Center to measure natural gas flaring — the release and burning of natural gas released during oil drilling. The project hopes to identify prominent flaring sites (as a precursor to working toward a reduction in flaring) by analyzing nightime satellite imagery! It’s possible to tease the data out of imagery using knowledge of the phenomenon and data crunching techniques. Fascinating.

Jamais links to a longer post by Ethan Zuckerman, which describes the project in more detail. Both pages also have gorgeous data maps of the results. I love this stuff, both because of the beauty of the maps (I LOVE maps), and the powerful visualization.

Thanks for the link, Jamais!