climate.us is an effort by former staff members at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to present climate science previously housed at climate.gov, including data, reports, articles, and congressionally mandated national climate assessments.

HABA-MABA and stuff. blog.geomusings.com/2026/06/25/i...

Following on to yesterday’s post… blog.geomusings.com/2026/06/23/g...

Essaying... blog.geomusings.com/2026/06/22/v...

Map (cartogram?) in the wild.

Today’s earworm open.spotify.com/track/74uoN2...

I’m starting to feel like I’m the only one in Maryland’s 5th district who isn’t running to replace Hoyer.

Turns out the best way to do research is to do research. Taking page from my grad school experience during the pandemic, I have forced myself into the habit of writing term papers when learning new concepts. blog.geomusings.com/2026/06/05/o...

Who would have known that the juxtaposition of Lucy Dacus and New Order would be rocket fuel for productivity?

Forgot to share this one the other day. Noodling through QA tasks and deciding to write up some of what I found. blog.geomusings.com/2026/06/02/a...

Late night ramblings... blog.geomusings.com/2026/06/04/l...

In part three of my anniversary series, I look at the constant iteration of the geospatial stack over 20 years, the opportunity costs of that iteration, and the responsibility conferred by the technical capability achieved over that time. blog.geomusings.com/2026/05/28/t...

Sean Trende’s piece on his son’s last day of school is full of joy and sadness and love and is well worth your time. www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/202...

The conversation around AI in the geospatial community has been evolving rapidly over the past couple of months. I pulled together a summary of what I've been seeing and reading. blog.geomusings.com/2026/05/25/g...

This young lady is 7 years old today.

“Just me and my dog and an impossible view.”

Open data was built to be used, but AI-scale consumption is changing the equation. Using OSM as a thought experiment, I explore what AI-optimized infrastructure that preserves openness, attribution, community values, and operational sustainability may look like. blog.geomusings.com/2026/05/14/o...

Without fail, the social media exhaust from GEOINT every year has me queuing up Black Flag.

I had a dream last night that I was stopped at a traffic light when a car pulled up next to me. Its windows were down and it was blasting “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” by Good Charlotte. This is not a big song for me but it’s now stuck in heavy rotation in my head. Damn subconscious.

I am convinced the phrase “Under-promise and over-deliver” was first uttered by the parent of a toddler.

I wonder if the ETL/ELT/iPaaS segment will survive past its current round of enterprise and annual contracts.

The phrase "generate a CSV formatted for easy import into Postgres" is magic with Claude. Even if you don't plan to use Postgres, it gives you a nicely cleaned up CSV. I usually also ask it to make a metadata markdown file to preserve richness it may need to strip out.

Spatial finance can see assets, hazards, emissions, and exposure with increasing precision. But places are also shaped by institutions, memory, liability, politics, and trust. This post looks at what spatial finance cannot yet see from orbit. blog.geomusings.com/2026/04/28/w...

@fedgeoday.bsky.social 2026 reinforced a key point: federal geospatial data assets are becoming foundational to AI. Four talks stood out to me, connecting data stewardship, foundation models, agents, provenance, and mature implementation. blog.geomusings.com/2026/04/27/f...

Anyone who really knows me knows how much I love REM. Their music has moved me since I first heard them. Over the past year, boygenius has joined them. Their small catalog gets right to the heart of me.

I love this so much

Geospatial AI may be accumulating the conditions for model collapse, where AI-derived labels silently re-enter training pipelines and errors compound across generations. NLP experienced this and geospatial can learn from it. I write about it here: blog.geomusings.com/2026/04/24/p...

Understanding can arrive in unexpected ways. A typewriter in my father’s shed became a way of seeing him more clearly. blog.geomusings.com/2026/04/22/t...

In 1983, the photographer Tom Arndt heard about something interesting happening in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn: a casting call for extras in “Purple Rain.” See his images of Minnesotans who wanted to be in Prince’s new movie: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jB-nEf

Cercana Systems LLC - From Archive to Map: Processing Geospatial Data with Claude Cowork by Cercana https://cercanasystems.com/2026/04/from-archive-to-map-processing-geospatial-data-with-claude-cowork/

New tools arrive with new vocabulary and new claims of rupture. What changes less is the work underneath. Context, judgment, and stewardship are the center of gravity beneath rapid technical change. I write about it here.

Spatial Analysis with Claude, Part 2 Following up on my previous post, I built a new Claude skill to take advantage of the increasing wealth of data online in cloud-native formats like GeoParquet. Given that DuckDB can read from such sources in place, I built the skill to use it to perform spatial…

RFC 1 is a reminder that governance and stewardship were part of shared technical infrastructure from the beginning. In geospatial, that same long arc runs through standards work like GeoJSON, STAC, and OGC Simple Features, and it matters even more as AI builds on inherited structure.

Always a good day when a new issue of @bittersouth.bsky.social arrives

Cercana Systems LLC - Cercana Executive Briefing — Week of March 28–April 3, 2026 by Cercana https://cercanasystems.com/2026/04/cercana-executive-briefing-week-of-march-28-april-3-2026/

On the treadmill: 4 miles, sub 10:00 pace, last mile sub 8:00. First time for both since prior to last year’s eye surgeries.

This week’s geospatial executive briefing points to something larger than product news. Standards work around EO embeddings, renewed national governance efforts, and growing defense-sector scrutiny all indicate a period of geospatial infrastructure evolution. cercanasystems.com/2026/04/cerc...

And I’m Out I have decided that, in the next phase of my career, the most advanced spatial analysis I will perform will be deciding where to park this baby. AI is taking over the entire industry anyway, so I thought I'd use it to make a conceptual rendering of my food truck/semi-retirement plan.…

Our latest geospatial executive briefing is up! cercanasystems.com/2026/03/cerc...

Shortening Translation Distance I spent the first five years of my career, from 1993 to 1998, doing mostly AML programming. There was also some AutoLISP, MapBasic, Clipper, and Avenue during that time, but it was mostly AML. In hindsight, that was a fortunate place to begin. I had no real exposure…

Geo Roadshow 2026 Over the next several months, I will be making the rounds on my 2026 geo-conference schedule, with stops at FedGeoDay, State of the Map US, and FOSS4G North America. These are not just events I plan to attend. They are communities I have been involved with in different ways, and…

FedGeoDay is now on ALL your favorite platforms! Follow us for updates on #FedGeoDay2026 — April 22–23 at US Census Bureau HQ. Keynotes, workshops & networking with federal geo leaders. Register: fedgeo.us #GIS #Geospatial #OpenData #FedGeoDay #FedGeoDay2026 #OSGeo

Twenty Years, Part One In 1993, at the very start of my career, I was a newly minted AML developer working on a data automation project. A good bit of the industry’s energy at the time was focused on digitizing vast amounts of geospatial information that still existed in analog form, including…

Hey y'all. @fedgeoday.bsky.social is on here now. The next FedGeoDay is April 22-23, 2026 at the US Census Bureau in Suitland. MD. Follow the account to for announcements and registration info.

I don’t wear green on St. Patrick’s Day, but I do have Sinead O’Conner on a loop all day.

Our hardware store had someone outside handing out small slices of “pizza pi.” Why a hardware store? Who knows? But it was fun.

Liking Claude Cowork so far.

"Field of Dreams" hits a little harder after your father has passed away.