I’d also want to see some internal detail in the states – big cities, major military installations, or the like. There’s a cluster I recognize as being in and around Sonoma County, but how close to Sacramento is the cluster to the northeast? How close to LA is that cluster in Southern California? How close to Boise is that one in the middle of Idaho?

The Japanese military launched nearly
9,300 balloon bombs to attack the United
States during World War II. Launched from
three primary sites on the east coast of
Japan the balloons followed the strong
wind currents to reach North America.
Documented military accounts from
November 1944 to July 1945 counted 285
positive sightings either on the ground or
in the air. The technology placed inside
these weapons allowed them to regulate
their altitude between 30,000-40,000 ft
and release their weapons after a period
of time. The only casualties on mainland
United States during World War II were
caused when an Oregon church group
investigated a downed balloon while on
a picnic, setting off the device.

Those are my suggestions; others will undoubtedly have different opinions about comma placement. But I do note that it was a church group, rather than a family. Killed were the pastor’s wife, and five children. Two of the children were related, but none were related to the pastor’s wife.

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B7a0RMbQbQ7RYzc4ZmFiM2EtMzM5Yy00NWVjLTg2MzYtMGU2N2FkZmUwNjAw&hl=en

Thanks

Michael

My only critiques are fairly minor:
1) State and province lines could be thinned down or screened back a little. They are the same density as the continental lines and some of the type. Pulling them back would help move the nation boundaries up a level in the visual hierarchy.
2) Projections are inconsistently applied between the main map frames. Not sure if this a bad thing, but I noticed it right away.
3) The shadow on the large red arrow bottom frame does not seem to match the smaller arrow shadows above.
4) Aisa is too dark. It creates a kind of island effect where the ocean near the western pacific begins to look like land. Maybe a lighter shade would better.
5) It might have been cool to see the large “launched” arrow drawn across the entire pacific, generalizing the route of most of the balloons. Although I see how that would ignore the many odd strikes away from the core US/Canada zone.

Cool map, any chance we could get a link to the full version of this?

If I were to suggest a change in the design, it would be to try to avoid the use of the Mercator projection for the wind speed map and the way that is used to set up the graph below it. In the current design, the regular spacing of the meridians on the projection are carried down into the graph showing the distribution of the balloon landing sites classified according to latitude of the landing site, as a proxy for distance. The double duty of the graph to show what I believe is an average travel rate of the balloons and indicating how long the balloons would be expected to take to cover the distances reinforces the use of latitude as a proxy for distance travelled.

But then why not use a distance preserving projection for this map? The launch sites seem to be reasonably close, given the overall scale of the map, so an azimuthal equidistant projection centred on the launch sites would allow a map user to read off the real distances travelled and you could redesign your graph to reclassify according to the real distance.

Thanks to Michael for sharing the map and Daniel for creating this blog!

Glenn

But I did manage to think of two things. First, the wind speed isolines don’t entirely do it for me. Better would be the prevailing wind directions (if available), leaving us to rely on the graph at the bottom for an idea of speed. My brain really wants to fill in the unknowable details of the exact paths that the balloons took, which the wind speeds don’t really allow for without direction (even though we can of course see where the balloons ended up).

Second, the sequential dot colors suggest quantity or some other numeric value more than they do dates. But I don’t have a good suggestion for something better!