Air Sciences and its partners have worked with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power on mitigating dust in the Owens Valley of California for decades. The work of these experts is now being published in Aeolian Research as part of a larger investigation into the modern destabilization and migration of the Keeler Dunes Complex – a small shoreline dune system in the northeast corner of Owens (dry) Lake.
Infrastructure and transportation are having a moment in media coverage and political efforts. These umbrella terms mostly bring ports, bridges, and roads to mind, but they also include something in Air Sciences’ wheelhouse: MOVES, the MOtor Vehicle Emission Simulator, developed and funded by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Now in its third iteration, MOVES provides a snapshot of tailpipe emissions for on- and off-road motor vehicles. The model encompasses six common air pollutants (ground-level ozone, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, lead, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide, known collectively as criteria air pollutants), greenhouse gases, and hazardous air pollutants.
When working with geospatial data on Google Earth (for example, from our AEREarth tool), you might need the elevations for some coordinates. If it’s only a handful, they’re easily found with Google Earth’s interface. But let’s say you want elevations for dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of locations.
We recently wrote a post about a handy Excel workbook you can use to query elevations for a set of coordinates in the Google Maps Application Programming Interface (API). Here, we’ll go over how to do the same thing using Python.