I've recently taken interest in various large monitoring systems generating large amounts of data. This story stuck out since it involves a NSF funded company looking to create a giant set of sensors across the United States for the purpose of monitoring various environmental factors. The data will be available for free to researchers. This technique is awesome because a vast network of researchers will undoubtedly come up with numerous creative uses and creative experiments using the data. The ability to take a large amount of data and then tell a story with it is very powerful. That's why I love data visualization and big data so much. Visually compelling stories drawn from interesting data sets are very intriguing to me. Who knows what we'll learn from this planetary monitoring network. I'm looking forward to finding out.