US NOAA update in the GeoGarage platform

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Turkey blockading Russia from Dardanelles

Turkey has begun a defacto blockade of Russian naval vessels, preventing transit through the Dardanelles and the Strait of Bosporus, between the Black Sea and Mediterranean.
According to the AIS tracking system for the movement of maritime vessels, only Turkish vessels are moving along the Bosphorus, and in the Dardanelles there is no movement of any shipping at all.
At the same time, both from the Black Sea, and from the Mediterranean Sea, there is a small cluster of ships under the Russian flag, just sitting and waiting. 
- courtesy of MarineTraffic -

From The Daily Caller

Turkey slammed the door on Russian sea travel Sunday, effectively shutting off Moscow’s access to the Black Sea and raising serious concerns among experts about escalating tensions in the region.
The recent blockade is preventing Russian naval vessels from traveling in the Black Sea to Syria.
The Russian Black Sea fleet has been a key component to Russian operations in the war-torn country, primarily operating out of the Syrian port of Tartus.
Without access to the Turkish Straits, Russian attempts to increase force projection in Syria or resupply the units in the country will be extremely limited.
“This better be a joke — because if not, WW3 is about to start,” quipped John Schindler, former NSA operative and national security columnist at the Observer.

'Yauza', a logistics ship of the Russian Navy passes through the Dardanelles
in front of a Turkish submarine on Nov. 30 
(see video)

Schindler’s concern is certainly warranted.
The conflict between Russia and Turkey adds fuel to the raging fire that is Syria.
As a NATO member, Turkey is party to Article 5 of the NATO convention which considers an attack on any of the NATO allies an attack on them all, including the United States.
NATO has shown support for Turkey throughout the incident and the issue will certainly be brought up as Turkish President Ahmet Davutoglu visits NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg today.

The blockade is the most recent counter in the standoff between the Turkish and Russian governments that was sparked by the downing of a Russian Su-24 bomber by Turkish forces last week.
In response, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Saturday that Russia would begin sanctions against certain Turkish exports as well as a halt to charter flights between the two countries. Additionally, Russia armed its fighter aircraft with air-to-air missiles for the first time Monday, giving them an offensive capability against any future aggression by Turkish aircraft.
“The egos of Putin and Erdogan may spin any future incident beyond control,” Boris Zilberman, a Russia expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a D.C.-based think tank, told Business Insider.

Dardanelles Straight with the GeoGarage platform (NGA chart)

It is a 1936 agreement that gives Turkey control over the Bosporus Straits and the Dardanellesand regulates the transit of naval warships.

The Convention gives Turkey full control over the Straits and guarantees the free passage of civilian vessels in peacetime.

It restricts the passage of naval ships not belonging to Black Sea states.

The terms of the convention have been the source of controversy over the years, most notably concerning the Soviet Union's military access to the Mediterranean Sea. 

As the only direct Russian access point to the Mediterranean, the effects of the Turkish blockade pose both economic and military concerns for Russia.
Turkey is Russia’s second largest trade partner, while the Turkish Straits (the Bosporus and Dardanelles) are a primary shipping lane for Russian oil exports.
Any potential deployment of Russian ground forces to Syria would be significantly hampered by the blockade, along with the resupply of the current Russian forces based in Syria.
The blockade is not the first instance of conflict between Russia and Turkey over access to the Straits. In the early years after World War II, Turkey was pressured by the then Soviet Union to allow unfettered Soviet access to the Straits.
Tensions between the two countries eventually led to Turkey joining NATO in 1952, thus giving the country protection from the United States.
The access dispute has never been formally settled.

Links :

• Superstation95 :  Black Sea Fleet completly cut off

It’s time to geek out over a new global bathymetric data set

From Deep Sea News by Dr Martini

Nothing makes my little heart go pitter-patter like a new data set.
And the new General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) does not disappoint.
Let’s go geek out over some data, shall we?

What exactly is GEBCO?
It’s a giant, high-resolution map of the ocean seafloor (with some topography thrown in to make land feel better about itself).
This whole thing was the brain child of His Serene Highness Prince Albert I of Monaco, who in 1903 decided we needed to map the oceans.
I was amazed to learn that up until the early 1990’s these maps were still drawn by hand!
Then we realized that computers were actually pretty good at mapping too and first digitized maps came out in 1994, in a handy-dandy set of CD-ROM of course.

But now GEBCO’s all digital and ready to be downloaded at the click of a button from the interwebs.
It’s been 6 years since the last update and this one is awesome.
The fine folks at GEBCO channeled the data curating acumen of a million librarians to create this bathymetric pièce de résistance.
New data sets were added (the Coast of Chile is looking mighty fine if I do say so).
Metadata was added (the data that explains the data.
Did you use a fancy acoustic system or a rock tied to a rope to get that depth?).
They even got classified data from the U.S…..SHHHHH.
And then they did lots of basic statistics.

 It’s 1903 and Prince Albert I of Monaco is no longer feeling serene.

He’s feeling jaunty and gonna map the f**k out of some oceans.

‘Cause you had better flaunt those stats when you got ’em.
The mean depth of the ocean? It’s 3897 m (2.4 miles).
Where is 50% of the earth’s surface? Below 3200 m (2 miles).
What’s the percentage of the earth covered by water? 71%.

showing the "Deeps," according to Sir John Murray, 1899

But my favorite statistic has to be this one:

~900 ship-years of surveying would be needed to obtain complete multibeam coverage of the world’s oceans.

YES PEOPLE. 900 years.
In an ultimate show of carthographic geekery *SWOON*, they even figured out it would take 300 years to map the deep ocean and another 600 to map the shallow water near the coast.
But that’s actually not that bad considering there are over 700 high-resolution multibeam mapping systems out there ready to be deployed at any moment.
We’ll probably get there sooner than 2915.

NASA World Wind Bathymetry

Although they’ll probably need more than 2 CD-ROMS after mowing the ocean seafloor for all the data….
It’s time people.
Time to upgrade that bathymetry.
And you can find it all at http://www.gebco.net/
I know that’s what I’m doing this evening.

Links :

• Carpine-Lancre, Jacqueline, et al. “The history of GEBCO 1903-2003: the 100-year story of the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans.” (2003). 
• Weatherall, P., K. M. Marks, M. Jakobsson, T. Schmitt, S. Tani, J.-E. Arndt, M. Rovere, D. Chayes, V. Ferrini, and R. Wigley (2015), A New Digital Bathymetric Model of the World’s Oceans, Earth and Space Science, 2, doi:10.1002/2015EA000107.
• GeoGarage : Poster GEBCO2015 Bathy Crowdsourcing

Windsurfing by drone

Windsurfing by Drone - Hookipa, Maui from Karim Iliya

The best windsurfers on the planet gathered on Maui, Hawaii for the 2015 Novenove Aloha Classic of the American Windsurfing Tour.
Windsurfing is an incredibly dynamic and difficult sport.

Being that it takes place often in windy wavy conditions, it can be difficult to photograph.

A couple of the toughest photographers go out in the water to search for different angles, navigating through waves and trusting the windsurfers not to land on their heads.

I took to the skies with a quadrocopter drone.

It is by far the most difficult thing to film aerials of, that I have encountered.

With high winds and massive waves, the scene is constantly shifting and changing.

The windsurfer changes speed, and I discovered while shooting, that the wave slows down when it hits the reef.

You must avoid salt water ocean spray coming off the waves.

Battery time is cut in half, down to 6 or 8 minutes while battling the wind.

With each battery swap I had to clean salt water off the drone's camera.

Sometimes the drone is not fast enough to keep up with the windsurfer, and so I would have to turn the drone, and tilt the camera to keep them in the shot.

It was a balance.

The closer I got to the windsurfer, the more chance I had of messing up the shot.

I also almost had a near mid-air collision with Ricardo Campello's drone.

The screws in my drone are rusted, but it's still holding up.

As challenging is it was filming this, it was also the most exciting subject to film.

Transiting Hong Kong waters (time-lapse)

Time-lapse (speed ~ 120x): transiting Hong Kong waters, 

underway to Chiwan, September 2014 - faster - 

Shenzhen to Hong-Kong with the GeoGarage

Chiwan Port, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China to Hong-Kong vessel traffic