Climate Anomalies Visualizations

One of the most important datasets on climate change has come from the NCEI NOAA. And it is very simple — just the month, the year, and the average temperature anomaly for that month and year, all the way from the 1850s to the present.

Some people have made incredible transformations of this simple data into truly powerful visualizations and animations (check climate spiral and the warming stripes).

I got introduced to this dataset during a climate science and policy class taught by Prof. Amir Jina. Students were asked to think deeply about creating a compelling and world-changing visual output from it. This was a really tough task, especially since the spiral and stripes pretty much do it all.

I wanted to push myself creatively and decided to make at least five distinctive and creative plots from that same data.

I really love these github-style contribution charts, they are like a calendar, heatmap, progress-tracker all packed into one. It does the job in conveying the message – climate change is pretty obvious seeing that color transitioning from blue to deep red. While it makes use of all white space in a chart, it is not completely intuitive to the viewer at first glance, there is a need for a guided tour.

3-d plots make amazing use of the visual medium, they are interactive, fun, and have that play-around-to-find-out element which is just great for recall value. This too makes use of all data present and allows for the third-dimension. The third dimension is really useful in this case as you can see monthly patterns, you can answer questions such as ‘do winter months see the same anomaly as summer months?’. With this graph there is no need for using excel to explore the data; all 2092 x 3 data points exist here in this blanket! However, it has one major drawback, it is useless without the visual medium. You can’t print this, it can’t be in books, it can’t be shared physically. But with screens being so ubiquitous, there can always be a QR code of this that can be shared physically. It’s just about finding the best workaround.

What about people who have visual impairments? Turning data into audio can be effective. It is however not effective in all cases. You cannot turn very large datasets into audio files without making a 30 minute audio clip. Who wants to listen to very odd notes for a very long time? You cannot use it to explain relationships between 2 variables – the audio medium does not provide space for that unless the second variable is time and it has to be chronologically in order for it to make sense. But it's great for small, simple datasets especially when the data represents something really crucial. In this case, I used a double bass to show this data and you can see how the notes’ frequencies change as time passes, as climate change becomes more and more severe.

At this point, I was seriously parched for creative juices. I thought of things I haven’t used and came up with ‘words’. Words can be used as data too, and they also double up as a message. While I had to find the perfect 18 character phrase for this to work, it did do the job! It’s not the most informative or technically inspired, but it qualifies for the purposes of this challenge.

Have you ever thought about how to tell kids about climate change? While people do worry about it being sensitive and everything, I was mainly worried about how kids view numbers, graphs in their brain. I don’t think anything with axes would work for them, neither would numbers in the context of temperature — kids don’t know what hot or cold mean in numbers. As a child, I used to love playing around with thermometers. I got a very intuitive sense of how temperature interacted with lines going up and down by that. This graph does that, it uses a thermometer-style (single axis) plot with markers for years and keeps it simple. I agree: there can be more work done on making it look like a real thermometer. You know why this plot is not that relevant for kids this generation? They don’t play with thermometers. They either have digital ones, or none at all. I might have to keep the brain running with more ideas on visualizing climate change for children.