March | 2023 | Steve Schwarz Photography

The “joys” of buying something old. It could be a house or a vehicle. There is the realization the previous owner made some changes “renos” that- Well, sure could be done differently.

This 1985 Toyota BJ60 Landcruiser had a Wilson switch installed – sort of. They didn’t remove the Toyota installed Superglow system and added a few wires to resemble the Wilson Switch. One of the wires was jammed under a fuse in the fuse box, and they used a on-off switch instead of a push-on (momentary) switch. Did they swapout the 12v glowplugs from the Superglow system for the recommended 10.5v glowplugs for the Wilson Switch?

For those that don’t know what the Superglow system is, or what the Wilson Switch is – They are different ways of warming up glowplugs in a diesel engine.

Opening up the dashboard, steering column and drivers side kick plate to figure out what the previous owner had done, and install the Wilson Switch.

The past couple of months I have been writing code in Google Earth Engine (GEE). For those that don’t know what GEE is – in brief is a database of satellite imagery and a code window to create a run scripts. Data can be uploaded to the GEE platform, and exported (downloaded). The database of satellite imagery includes recent (today) and historical data (as far back as 1972) depending to the type of satellite. Landsat data is continuous from 1972 – current, Sentinel 1 (2014- current), Sentinel-2 (2016-current), and other satellites have shorter time periods (2000-current). In essence, the availability of historical data provides a means to “move back” in time, where as the current and yet-to be collected data provides a means to move forward in time.

Air temperature Trend (2000-2020)

In this post I will demonstrate a couple of GEE Mapping Tools that I created in GEE to illustrate 20 year Trends (2000-2020) in Air Temperature, Snowfall/snow depth/density/temperature, and Lake ice-temperatures across the NWT.