Mapping Air Population
- 1. Mapping Air Population & Mapping Real-Time Flight Data Michael P. Peterson & Paul Hunt & Konrad Weiß Geography / Geology University of Nebraska at Omaha
- 2. Air Population • Air population refers to the total number of people flying above the earth at any point in time. – a distinct and separate population from those still physically connected to earth • Ephemeral, like urban areas having a “high daytime population” – Air population exhibits similar daily patterns
- 3. Animated Atlas: Air Traffic over North America – 2007 • 75 animations, frame-based, 2003-2006 – Total flights, by airline, by aircraft, by city, by corridors, by region, by states – Condensing 24-hours into 30-seconds – Showed flight patterns • Pulsating hubs • Red-eye flights • Popcorn commuter traffic
- 4. LAX
- 5. JFK
- 7. United Airlines – pulsating hubs
- 9. Data • Atlas based on FAA data • Flight tracking companies now collect data - FlightAware, - FlightRadar24, - PlaneFinder - Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) - Raspberry Pi, dongle and filter $85 total
- 10. FlightAware PiAware Sites Urumqi, China
- 11. Air Population • Comment made to Paul: We should map the number of people flying above the US. • Pursued FAA connection – Needed dedicated hardware (router, server) – Special Connection (IPsec) – Installation of specialized data communication software • Designed for data security
- 12. Solution • Flight Tracking companies – All present maps of current traffic – Read data from their server using JavaScript • AJAX through proxy server • Organized by individual tile – Duplicated their data retrieval methods – Retrieving lat/long of flights, airline, aircraft, etc.
- 13. Evolving Implementation • Initial implementation was real-time – flight data was requested on page load • Later we decided we wanted more than just a snap shot – Began storing a day’s worth of data – required server side database – Now hourly requests stored (no more on-demand) • In the future we will use this for daily animations
- 14. Programmatic Methods • Mapping done with ESRI ArcGIS API for JavaScript – API performs spatial queries that allows features to be intersected based on geographic location – General Programmatic tasks • Flight data requested from database (AJAX) • Planes enhanced with population data • Planes (JSON objects) are added to map as points • Planes (and attributes) spatially aggregated to states
- 16. Map of Planes
- 17. Air Population by State
- 18. Ratio of Air to Ground Population
- 20. Heatmap
- 21. 5 AM
- 22. 7 AM
- 23. 9 AM
- 24. 3 PM
- 25. 11 PM
- 26. 3 AM Ratio Air to Ground
- 27. 3 PM Ratio Air to Ground