rickpaulos

Whilst browsing the Strava Global Heat map I saw some huge plumes in the Columbia river near Hood River Oregon.

any idea what this about? It's on the scale of a nuke plant but I see nothing like in the area. There are quite a few smaller plumes in the Columbia river both up and down stream.

Looking at Google maps, there are just a couple of small brewerys in the area of the apparent discharge.

url for the strava location:
https://www.strava.com/heatmap#12.03...71235/hot/ride

kahn

Wild guessing - sewer treatment outfalls? Hotsprings from the nearby volcanoes!!!!!!

msu2001la

You guys know that the Strava "heat map" doesn't actually measure heat, right? It only shows user uploaded GPS tracks as "hot"

My guess (knowing nothing about this area) is that this is probably people in kayaks, boats, swimming, etc tracking routes in/on the water.

It looks like there are a few SUP, Kayak and Windsurfing rental places in that location, and I see tons of small boats on Google Maps.

rickpaulos

duh. And yet there are obvious heat plumes in the river images Strava is using as background all up and down the river.

kahn

Oh, yes, Hood River is a windsurfing mecca. And they have some great brew pubs, too. (g)

Or maybe a large barge was making its way up/down the river.

dsaul

People Strava activities other than cycling.

msu2001la

You are seeing GPS tracks, not something coming from the background image. If you set the data opacity to 0% you can see what the background image looks like without the GPS data overlaid on top of it:




Here is what a popular surfing area in Maui looks like. Some surfers use Strava to track their activities while in the water. When this gets repeated thousands of times in the same area, it looks like a "plume", but these are all just individual GPS tracks:

noimagination

Well, to be fair, in your original post you did mention several possible sources of actual heat energy (e.g. nuke plant, brewery, discharge) and you did not mention any possible sources of Strava GPS "heat" (e.g. boaters/SUPers/kyakers/etc. using Strava to record their activities). So, it is not unreasonable for a reader of your post to conclude that you were confusing heat energy with using "heat" as a proxy for the frequency of GPS tracks from Strava.