Updated: 14 September 2006
PDF of Central Asia, with shaded topography and ancient place-names (1.3 MB).
I studied geography as an undergraduate and have continued to pursue various geography projects over the last 20 years.
Since 1982 I have been interested in the geography of Central Aisa.This has
been frustrating, because good maps—and good information in general—is
very scarce on the region.
Happily, excellent topographic data is now publicly available from NOAA
and NASA provides beautiful true-color and enhanced-color maps at the Visible
Earth website, which use image data from the MODIS sensor overlaid with
shadow-cast terrain data. Below is a sample:
This sample shows central Afghanistan, with cities, rivers, and a projection grid overlaid on a surface-character image from NASA's MODIS imagery. The linework and placenames were done in Inkscape, which is an open-source editor which understands unicode and therefore handles exteneded-Arabic script beautifully.
I have posted the base-files I am using to create maps of Central Asia. Note
that many of them are very large, so do not click on the links unless you have
a fast internet connection! I have cropped and reprojected Central Asian topography
(2.3 MB) and surface character (4.3 MB) on
an equidistant conic projection with 20¾N and 40¾N as the standard parallels.
Then I filtered the surface character image to bring out contrast in arid regions,
and for legibility. The extreme simplification
(1.6 MB) may be useful to others, but I am using a mild
simplification (4.3 MB). I also created a one-degree-by-one-degree projection
grid (1.1 MB) with the same crop and resolution to lay over the other grids
and plot features manually.
