Hurricanes: a special year?
This is currently the hurricane season in the North Atlantic. As everyone knows, Harvey, Irma, Jose and Maria hit the Carribeans and the USA between July and September. When I saw a lot of reports about the damages in the news and in my Twitter timeline as well, I wondered if 2017 was a special year or not. I also wondered if this perception of 2017 being a “special” year was due to the media and the Internet, making us more aware of this kind of severe weather than before.
So I told myself: "Try to find some data about Hurricanes and go check it!!" First, I thought I would find all that I wanted on the NOOA website. Indeed! There is a lot of content on this website (especially very interesting shapefiles, and you know how I love geographical data...). But, I was actually looking for more detailed datasets. That is why I used the Unisys website and this one was a real mine of information! This website allowed me to download all the tracks of almost all the hurricane since 1851! And here is the beginning of my journey about hurricanes!
So I told myself: "Try to find some data about Hurricanes and go check it!!" First, I thought I would find all that I wanted on the NOOA website. Indeed! There is a lot of content on this website (especially very interesting shapefiles, and you know how I love geographical data...). But, I was actually looking for more detailed datasets. That is why I used the Unisys website and this one was a real mine of information! This website allowed me to download all the tracks of almost all the hurricane since 1851! And here is the beginning of my journey about hurricanes!
Where are you from? Where are you going?
I have to admit that it was a little bit boring to download all the data files and put them into one only file but it was a really important step in order to have all the tracks for all the hurricanes ever recorded.
Each point gives a wind strength, a pressure, a date and a geographical point. All these data allowed me to create a map and to process a heatmap. The heatmap was created like the one I did in my AirBnB work. The heatmap gives an overview of the strength over the Caribbean. You can see that all the Caribbean’s islands are very vulnerable because this is where the maximum wind speeds were measured.
Each point gives a wind strength, a pressure, a date and a geographical point. All these data allowed me to create a map and to process a heatmap. The heatmap was created like the one I did in my AirBnB work. The heatmap gives an overview of the strength over the Caribbean. You can see that all the Caribbean’s islands are very vulnerable because this is where the maximum wind speeds were measured.
The date in the file also allowed a time analysis to see if there were more hurricanes in the past or if there are more today. We can also see if a 2017 is a special year or not. In fact, we can see that for instance that 2005 was a very dangerous year (Katrina, Wilma, Rita...).
All these data gave me the opportunity to create the following dashboard. I think it is possible to find lots and lots of new analysis. If you are interested in it, feel free to contact me, I will give you the dataset with pleasure!
Feel free to leave a message!
Hi Jonathan .. I loved this data viz..I am currently working on a college project and would like to work on this dataset. Can you please share the dataset?
ReplyDelete