EarthObserver App

The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University has released an App called EarthObserver specifically for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. EarthObserver is available from the Education Category of the iTunes App Store. The app is free for a limited time.

With EarthObserver you can learn about our planet’s terrestrial landscapes, oceans and seas, frozen ice caps, atmosphere and clouds, geologic terrains, topography, nautical charts, natural hazards, human impacts, and many other earth and environmental science topics as you travel and explore with your fingertips.

EarthObserver provides these main topics and sub-topics:
Basemap (computer-generated color-shaded relief of land and ocean floor)
  - US Coastal Bathymetry (with color palette appropriate to provide details of bays, sounds, estuaries, harbors and rivers)
  - US Nautical Charts (paper raster and digital electronic at all scales for Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf of Mexico, Bering Sea, Arctic and Great Lakes)
  - US Topographic Sheets (entire USGS collection for US mainland, Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico)
  - Geologic Maps (entire world, by continent, by country and by US state showing formation ages, names and rock types)
  - Geophysical Maps (global earthquakes, tectonic plates and boundaries, gravity anomalies, geoid height, magnetic anomalies and the configuration of world stress)
  - Land Surface (temperatures day and night, primary productivity, vegetation index, land cover classifications and diversity, forest cover types and fragmentation)
  - NASA Visible Earth (global earth scenes for each month)
  - Ocean Floor (crustal age, sediment types, sediment thickness, seabed heatflow, seafloor true color, seafloor spreading rates, manganese nodules)
  - Ocean Surface (temperature, salinity, primary productivity, temperature during the prior ice age)
  - Human Impact (area per person, human footprint index, population density (2010), infant mortality rate, underweight children)
  - Hydrology (river drainage basin outlines, drainage networks, river flow accumulation)
  - Natural Hazards (cyclones, drought, earthquakes, floods, landslides, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions)
  - Atmosphere and Clouds (aerosols, carbon monoxide, cloud fraction, cloud optical thickness, cloud particle radius, cloud reflectance, cloud water content, radiation, solar insolation)
  - Snow, Ice and Water (ice cover, permafrost cover, snow cover, snow-water equivalent, water leaving radiance, water vapor)
  - Shorelines and Political Boundaries (countries, provinces, states, maritime)

GeoMapApp is a free companion application that runs on Windows, Unix/Linux and Mac OS X can be used to display the EarthObserver content, and provide additional content and tools for interactive analysis and graphing. It is an earth science exploration and visualization application that provides access to thousands of data sets, options for importing your own data, and analytical capabilities.