Mapping the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

NASA Earth Observatory: Gulf Oil Spill Creeps Towards Mississippi Delta

NASA’s Earth Observatory has posted a number of images of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, taken by the MODIS instruments on NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites. The photo above was taken on April 29. (The imagery is also available as a Google Earth overlay, Google Earth Blog reports.)

NOAA is also tracking the spill, and is producing trajectory maps like this one:

NOAA map: Approximate oil locations from, April 27, 2010 to May 1, 2010, including forecast for May 2

Scroll down to the bottom of the NOAA page for the most recent trajectory map. Via GIS Lounge.

The New York Times has an interactive map that tracks the spread of the oil spill; it’s awfully small, though. Via Geospatial News.

Update, May 4:

DigitalGlobe image of Deepwater Horizon oil spill cleanup Via Gizmodo, DigitalGlobe has made available a number of high-resolution images. I mean really high-resolution — 50 cm/pixel.

Via AnyGeo, ESRI’s gulf oil spill response page, containing a number of maps and applications.

Virgil Zetterlind writes to say that he’s put together an animated view of the aforementioned MODIS imagery using the Google Earth API; the Google Earth plugin will be required to view it on this web page. (It also takes a while to load.)

Update, May 5:

Google on mapping the oil spill in Google Earth.

Update, May 8:

Using the Google Earth plugin, Paul Rademacher illustrates the size of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill by overlaying it on large, familiar cities (Google LatLong, Ogle Earth).

Update, May 11:

Gulf of Mexico Mess

Via James, Matthew Baker’s map (above) shows both the spill and the oil infrastructure (platforms, pipelines) in the Gulf.

Google Maps Mania has an updated roundup of maps of the spill.

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