Fire Weather and Wildfire Potential, Risk and Incident Maps

Online Fire Weather and Wildfire Maps:

U.S. Forest Service Remote Sensing Applications Center Active Fire Mapping Program

National Interagency Airspace Restricted Airspace Information Maps

The Geospatial Multi-Agency Coordination Group or GeoMAC, is an internet-based mapping application originally designed for fire managers to access online maps of current fire locations and perimeters in the conterminous 48 States and Alaska.

The Northwest Interagency Coordination Center serves as the northwest area geographic focal point to provide logistical support and intelligence relative to anticipated and ongoing wildfire activity for all federal and cooperating state wildland fire suppression agencies.

Geographic Area Coordination Center - The GACG's mission is to provide leadership and support not only for wildland fire emergencies, but to other emergency incidents (i.e. earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc), as necessary.

National Fire Weather Maps - A key component to the new national fire weather page is its interactive map that allows you to examine critical fire weather information at the national level initially, but quickly provide you access to local and regional fire weather data as well.

The Wildland Fire Assessment System was developed by the Fire Behavior unit at the Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula, Montana.

View and Interact with the Fire Weather and Wildfire Risk Maps

Maps of Structurally Deficient Maps in the United States

Download maps of structurally deficient maps on the U.S. National Highway Network.

It's amazing to think with all the wealth generated during the dot boom and the housing boom that enough funds were not devoted to at least maintaining our national infrastructure.

View and download maps of structurally deficient bridges in the United States

Learn2Map Free GIS Tutorial and Shapefile Atlas - Learn GIS Online

New to GIS?

Are you new to GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and mapping? Would you like to learn what it is all about and learn how to create your own maps? Would you like to begin a new professional career? Our online Learn2Map™ Tutorial and Atlas is designed to give you a quick-start introduction to the basics of GIS. For a brief introduction to GIS, what it is, and how it is used, click here and then return to this page to learn more about how you will benefit from using this tutorial.

In just a few minutes you can begin to learn how to create sophisticated maps. The easy-to-follow step-by-step distance learning online tutorial is based on free resources. There is nothing to purchase. All you need to begin mapping today is the Learn2Map™ Tutorial and Atlas.

Why Learn GIS?

Most of us use maps frequently. We usually use them to figure out how to get from here to there. Without simple street maps this relatively easy task would be much more difficult. We would have to read instructions, line-by-line, and sort of imagine the geography described in the instructions and superimpose that with what we see as we progress to our destination. We have probably all done this. Maps make this task so much easier. But maps are more than a navigational aid. They can show us relationships that we could never see by pouring through pages of data. Maps can provide answers to questions not found elsewhere and make you ask questions you never would have thought to ask. Maps bring raw and often boring data to life.

There are applications for maps and a need for mapmakers in nearly all fields. Some common uses for maps and GIS are to target sales and marketing areas; redraw congressional districts; find the best route between point a and point b; determine the race, ethnicity and income of folks living certain distances from a facility that pollutes the air; locate clusters of families with certain diseases. Others include environmental planning, traffic analysis and much more.



Access the free Learn2Map GIS Tutorial and Shapefile Atlas now.

Free U.S. National Park Maps in HIgh Resolution Formats

Travellers, campers, hikers, backpackers - U.S. National Park maps organized by state.

View and Download National Park Maps

Free TOPO Maps for Campers, Travellers, Backpackers and Hikers

Beautiful high resolution scans of original U.S. topographic maps. HINT: These can be loaded into the free GeoView 4.0. These are very large highly detailed high resolution images. It is best to right-click on the topo image link and download to your computer. Index map included.

View and Download Free 250K Topographic Maps

Niche Web Tip - Don't Lose Pages - Redirect

I'm constantly amazed at the number of web pages that go bad. Government, non-profit and commercial websites that seemingly have large budgets often have pages that go missing. It is very frustrating to click on an interesting link and end up at a page that says "404 not found." There is no good reason for this.

At MapCruzin I've tried to make sure that there are no lost pages. The reason I do this is that links exist forever. Who knows how many folks have bookmarked pages or linked to them from websites. Over the 14 years that MapCruzin has been online, I'm sure that there are many thousands.

The first fix, but not the best, is to redirect your "404 not found" to a real web page that will help visitors find what they are looking for. I do this at MapCruzin.com with this 404page.html. Instead of a page that goes nowhere, folks can search the website and hopefully find what they are looking for.

Better yet is to always redirect pages so that visitors never see your 404 page unless, of course, they type a url incorrectly or the link is configured wrong. If you have moved a page, redirect the old to the new. If you have deleted a page, redirect it to a related page.

Here's how I do these two redirects:

To redirect any "404 not found" to a real web page of your own design, first make a page and name it "404page.html." or anything you like. Then create a file named ".htaccess" in the root directory of your website if it does not already exist. The contents of the "htaccess" file should be "ErrorDocument 404 http://www.mapcruzin.com/404page.html." If you already have an ".htaccess" file, add the content to the existing file.

To redirect any webpage, replace the content of the old page with the following:

<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>Redirect</TITLE>

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0;URL=http://www.mapcruzin.com/">
</HEAD>

</body>
</html>

The "0" after "CONTENT=" denotes the length of time the server will pause on the page - I set this to zero so there is no pause at all. Place your new page url after "CONTENT="0";URL=".
In this example, the page is redirected to http://www.mapcruzin.com, but you can put any url in there that you like.

This should help lower the aggravation level of your visitors and keep them on your website a bit longer. After all, you've made a great deal of effort to create valuable content so it makes sense to take these relatively simple steps to assure that your visitors find it.

Free Extreme Weather & Disaster Maps, Resources and GIS Shapefiles

Free Weather Maps from Around the World

Climate Change and Global Warming Maps

Climate Change Impacts in the United States Maps, Charts, Tables

Global Warming & Climate Change with Google Earth and Google Maps Mashups

NOAA National Weather GIS

Temperature and Precipitation Forecasts 2010 through 2099 Based on IPCC Data

Natural Disaster GIS Shapefile Map Layers

And More ...