Several years ago, I stumbled on a map so shocking to my modern workaday sensibilities that I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. “Oh, zounds, look at this old thing,” I almost certainly thought.

The European Space Agency’s launch of the Sentinel-5P satellite in October of 2017 ushered in a new era of atmospheric monitoring from space. The instrument provides near-daily global measurements of ozone, NO₂, SO₂, formaldehyde, aerosol, carbon monoxide and, crucially, methane, a substantial component of global greenhouse gas emissions. The enormous…

☞ I explicitly excluded any overtly offensive images from this rundown that I could identify. Even so, some of the subject matter (as well as their occasionally unnecessary embellishments) may strike modern audience members as inappropriate. The images are a reflection of both their era and medium (magazine advertising). …

You know that feeling of desperation you get when you walk into a darkened movie theater in the middle of a beautiful sunny day and you can’t see a darn thing? Ohhh, I think I see the exit sign! But where the heck are the seats? …

Unless you completely avoided modern society in August and September, you helped make this map. If you were in a car, bus or train with a combustion engine, if you were in an electric vehicle that was charged using non-renewable energy or if you consumed something that was shipped to…

Note: This post was updated on January 3, 2019 to clarify that lidar was used as ground truth data to train the model only. Lidar is not needed to run the model; it requires only ~1m resolution four-band imagery (near infrared, red, green and blue) as inputs. Much fuss has…