Online Data

Aerial Photographs of Colorado - 1,700 digitized aerial photos of Colorado taken by the U.S. Forest Service from 1938 to 1947, searchable using a map interface or geographic keyword search. 150 dpi images and metadata can be downloaded free of charge. Coverage is from Boulder, Clear Creek, Eagle, Gilpin, Grand, Jefferson, Larimer, and Summit Counties. A project of the CU Libraries' excellent Map Library.

Alexandria Digital Library Gazetteer - search this world gazetteer to find place names and lat/long coordinates for just about any populated place or named natural feature in the world.

Arctic GIS - Arctic Research Consortium of the United States (ARCUS) site linking to information about the availability of GIS data for the far north.

Arctic Graphics Collection - UNEP repository for outputs from their publications, projects, and web products, including figures and illustrations from the popular Vital Graphics series and GLOBIO human impact maps.

Arctic Portal - UNEP site focusing on environmental issues and government cooperation. Offerings include data sets and an Arctic Map Server presenting environmental variables and parameters.

Arctic Health Portal - from the National Library of Medicine and University of Alaska, a collection of information on diverse aspects of the arctic environment and the health of Northern peoples.

Barents Portal - an international effort (Finland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden) to share knowledge about the Barents region; includes links, news, photos, maps, and articles about every aspect of culture, environment, history, indigenous peoples, economy, transport, etc.

Computer Network of Arctic Marine Fauna - a joint German-Russian effort to document the distribution and composition of marine faunal communities on the Eurasian-Arctic shelf, particularly Ophiuroids and invertebrates.

dbSEABED - marine substrate information from seafloor surveys is unified in this source, which can import into your GIS or relational database.

GeoCommunicator - from the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service, well-organized access to land and mineral use records, a map server showing public lands, Public Land Survey System (PLSS) and other survey-based data, and reference documents on cadastral survey and land records.

Geodata.gov - the portal for GIS and spatial data from the U.S. government. Includes GIS for the Nation, the National Map, geographic names, and data in categories such as geological and geophysical, atmosphere and climatic, biology and ecology, and environment and conservation.

Geologic Atlas of the United States - TIFF images of 227 USGS map folios, produced between 1894 and 1945, with topographic and geologic maps. The maps cover selected areas of the United States, including Colorado's Engineer Mountain, Needle Mountains, Spanish Peaks, and Colorado Springs. The images take about 10-15 minutes to load but are publication-quality when they do (no low-rez PDFs here).

Global Change Master Directory - a clearinghouse of earth science data. Browse by topic (atmosphere, biosphere, climate indicators, cryosphere, human dimensions, hydrosphere, paleoclimate, etc.), data centers, locations, instruments, platforms, or projects.

Global Runoff Data Center - the worldwide repository of discharge data and associated metadata, focusing on global river discharge data for the sake of research linking global and local change issues. Operates under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) with the support of the Federal Institute of Hydrology, Germany.

Integrated Ocean Drilling Program - sponsored by funding agencies in the United States, Europe, and Japan, this program conducts basic research into the history of the ocean basins and the nature of the crust below the seafloor.

International Polar Year - maintained by the NSF, this portal is the official gateway to all things U.S. and IPY, including participating U.S. agencies and organizations, opportunities for researchers, classroom resources, and galleries.

International Tree-Ring Data Bank - maintained by the NOAA Paleoclimatology Program and World Data Center for Paleoclimatology, this data bank includes raw ring width or wood density measurements and site chronologies for more than 2000 sites on six continents.

Landsat GeoCover - Landsat remote sensing data from NASA for all land surfaces of the globe, in .sid file format, suitable for GIS projects and use as background images. For the same data in .tif format, one file per band, that is suitable for spectral analysis, go to the Global Land Cover Facility at the University of Maryland.

Mineral Database from mindat.org - data on minerals worldwide, which you can search by properties, chemical composition, mineral association, or geographic location. The entry for each mineral includes physical and chemical properties, type occurences, crystallography, optical and x-ray powder diffraction data, and related minerals.

Multi-language Glossary of Permafrost and Related Ground-Ice Terms - Revised in 2005, this permafrost glossary from NSIDC/World Data Center for Glaciology has terms in Chinese, English, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

National Archive of Marine Seismic Surveys - historic 2D and 3D seismic data covering offshore Alaska, California, and portions of the west coast. ChevronTexaco Corp. donated the data to the AGI in March 2005; the USGS and AGI are partnering in converting the data from magnetic tapes. The data are useful for understanding offshore structural geology, marine sedimentation, and fault systems.

National Climatic Data Center - NOAA - the world's largest active archive of weather data.

National Environmental Data Index - NOAA's growing index of environmental data and metadata from several federal government agencies.

National Geophysical Data Center - NOAA - more than 300 databases describing the solid earth, marine, and solar-terrestrial environments.

National Oceanographic Data Center - NOAA - global marine and coastal data, including climatic atlases, zooplankton time series, and History of the Arctic Exploration 2003: Cruise Reports, Data.

National Snow and Ice Data Center Data Catalog - data sets from many investigators, including data held in the Antarctic Glaciological Data Center (AGDC), ARCSS, Frozen Ground Catalog, NOAA, and World Data Center for Glaciology. Also special collections, such as Glaciers Long-Term Change Photograph Pairs, which match photographs of glaciers taken as early as the 1890s with recent photos taken from the same physical locations.

Niwot Ridge Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) data - includes archived raw data.

RealClimate blog - a commentary site on climate science that provides a quick response and missing context to developing media stories.

Seismic data on interactive map servers for the world, California, and Iceland.

Digital Data

The Information Center has several data sources on CD to support general research, including: