Goal: Helping to illustrate global changes in extreme weather through interactive visualization.
In recent years, we have grown used to climate records being broken on a regular basis. While this may seem unimportant at first, it is, in fact, largely attributable to climate change. As the drivers of climate change go unperturbed, the prevalence of climate records and extreme weather events is expected to increase. Through this data story, we draw upon changes in extreme weather and their impact on society at three levels of analysis: the global level, the city level, and the human level.
The hosted interactive website can be found here, along with a summary video here. We hope you both enjoy our visualizations and find them enlightening!
Our global story first discusses how global temperature anomalies have changed through the last century using a weather radial visualization with open-source NOAA data. This is followed by a discussion of how these temperatures are influenced by greenhouse gas emissions using a carbon emissions streamgraph, with information obtained from the International Energy Agency. The final visualization outlines different extreme weather events superimposed on a 3D globe, developed using Three.js, and how these have become more prevalent in recent years as a result of climate change.
The city story focuses on how changes in extreme weather are impacting cities. First, a discussion of cooling degree days is given, illustrating the cooling challenges that warmer climates will face in the future as a result of changing climate patterns. This is followed by a visualization showing a matrix of nine cities and their cooling exposures, developed using Rhino, with Grasshopper to extract cooling degree days, energy, and weather files. This leads us naturally to our last section, looking at the level of the individual.
The human story focuses on how changing global weather patterns are likely to impact individuals across the world. This was assessed using data related to heat-related deaths and and access to electricity. Data for these plots was taken from Our World in Data for electricity, and The Lancet for heat-related deaths. Recommendations are then provided for how to address the problems illustrated in this data story through legislative, infrastructural, and technological changes.
Alejandro Romero. Brown University alumni pursuing a Master's program at Brown with coursework at Harvard University.
Matthew Stewart. Ph.D. Candidate in Engineering Sciences and Data Science at Harvard University.
Nada Tarkhan. Ph.D. Candidate at the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology.
Max Urbany. Student pursuing a Master's of Data Science at Harvard University.