Water Atlas Globe
Seventy-one percent of this planet is ocean. Almost everything else about it - every river stage, reservoir pool, tide record and desalination plant, is a number somebody measured. This is an instrument for reading them all at once, with the sources still attached.
01 · The Planet
Water is the one dataset that touches everything: power grids hang off reservoir elevations, grain prices ride river stages, and whole cities audit their futures in millimeters of sea level. Yet the record of it is scattered across a hundred agencies, formats and datums.
The Water Atlas gathers that record into one navigable object, a globe where reservoirs, lakes, gauges, dams, desalination plants and cloud-seeding programs share a single stage, and where the honest answer to “how full, how high, how fast” is always in view.
02 · Time
The atlas is timeline-first. Scrub from 1900 to the present and watch the planet’s plumbing change state: Hoover closes its gates in 1936 and Lake Mead is born; the Aral Sea starts to vanish in 1960; satellite altimetry switches on in 1993 and suddenly the whole ocean is a gauge; the Colorado megadrought pulls two decades of water out of the West.
26 documented events, commissionings, droughts, floods, record lows and data-regime changes, are pinned to the scrubber, so the line on every chart comes with its history.
03 · Trust
This is not a dashboard that launders data into vibes. Each feature carries a source registry, a confidence score, and a value class - observed, modeled, interpolated or derived, and when two sources disagree, the atlas shows you the disagreement instead of hiding it: the magnitude, the timestamps, and why one reading is preferred.
Coverage is honest, too. Where the record is thin, an unmetered basin, a contested gauge, a program that publishes sorties but not yields, the atlas says so, plainly, instead of inventing a value. 20 registered sources, ranked primary to inferred, from NOAA and USGS to satellite altimetry and Landsat-derived surface water.
04 · The Instrument
Globe for the cinematic whole, layers you can switch, features you can fly to. Plan for the analyst’s flat map, rankings, anomalies, side-by-side comparison. Section for the cut-away, basin profiles with the waterline drawn where the record says it is, and the delta from baseline made visible.