For my final data visualization project, I chose to work with a data set that measured the change in sea levels by millimeter from the year 1993 to 2004. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Global Monitoring Laboratory collected such measurements from satellite radar altimeters, which is the process of determining the distance from the satellite to a target surface by measuring the satellite-to-satellite round trip of a radar pulse. I have chosen the Atlantic Ocean during a 11 year time span, visualizing the data in a bar graph that illustrates the increases and decreases of sea levels at the end of each year.
I decided to work with this dataset because I am interested in how the rapid effects of climate change in our seas are more visble to the public because of the major effects they have on communities. I wanted to highlight this dataset because it represents the climate effects we see on a day to day basis.
In my visualization, the data is represented as a bar graph showing the percentage of increase or decease in sea levels from the year 1993-2004.
To interact with the visualization, try clicking on the still image of my code. This will bring you to my code in which you can hover over the waves to see each individual years percentage. For each bar on my interactive bar graph it represents a year and its increase or decrease at the end of the month. So one year might increase or decrease by a certain degree based on a change in climate for the given year so by hovering over the ocean you can see how tall the bar is based on the specific change.
One interesting thing I noticed during this project is the data set for the Atlantic data showed that the ocean levels often decreased at the end of each year. While the pacific data showed the ocean levels rising higher at the end of the year and decreasing in the beginning to middle of the year.
Something I still wonder about is because the data was only collected up until mid way through 2005 I wonder how fast ocean levels are starting to rise more rapidly in recent years. If I would of had more time I would have created to bar graph showing the data from this organization and a more recent collect of data to see the uptick in sea levels in comparison to 10 years ago.
The most challenging moment of this project was sorting though the data set, deleting lines of code I didn't need or wasn't important for my interactive project. I found this quite difficult because there was data for each month for 14 years of ocean levels so I was spending a lot of time making it easier for myself to delate data than using the data for my project.
If I had more time, I would like to add more years of data because I delete 3 years because some lines of data were missing for the given year. I also would of start visualizing pacific's ocean levels because I only chose to illustrate the Atlantic oceans data set.
My proudest moment during this project was when I got my data set all prepared to then start coding. I found that I was proud after sorting through many lines of code because I had set myself up for success when beginning to code.