Climate Anomalies
This map was created as part of a lab in class. I took data from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and more specifically from their Global Temperatures Page. I made two raster layers from the data provided, which is found as a netCDT format. In the data, one could take a base year of ranges. In climatology, 30 years is a standard measure of aggregated time. Shorter periods show greater but perhaps less stable forms of change. A thirty year period can give us a better idea of how quickly or how slowly climate is changing. I picked the years 1889-1918 for my base period because 1889 is the earliest we can get for average global temperature. Just a quick reminder that this was in the age when steamboats, railroads, and telegraphs were the fastest form of travel and communication, gasoline powered cars were slapped together horse-carriages by tinkerers, and Benjamin Harrison was president of the United States. The fact they could do this kind of data aggregation and analysis is astounding! I then compared it to 1990-2020, to see the closest time period nearly 100 years later, and I also wanted to see it compared to a more recent time, 1901-1920. The industrialization of the turn of the century United States, and then the developing world 100 years later has had a big impact on global average temperatures. I wanted to see how this affected that.
Global Temperature Averages Compared to Turn of the 20th Century Temperature Averages.pdfPDF copy of original map
- The All-Important Scale Bar
I controlled the extreme range of whites by setting it to zero, and then placing yellow and green at 2% to the left and right of the color scale, or 48% and 52%, allowing for neutral whites to not dominate or distract from the meaning of the map. I set the reds to the positive extreme, an orange for lesser positive extremes, then yellow for almost neutral; then light green, light blue, and ultramarine for the negative colors. This helped the map not have distracting empty white space.
- Interesting Spatial Correlations
The Western/Midwestern/Northeastern United States plus a good chunk of southern Canada cooled down relative to 1889-1918 from 1901-1930. I thought the Dust Bowl was due to a drought - but perhaps this cooling was not good for the environment either. In the 1990's,-2020's, it warmed up except for a cool wet spot called the Puget Sound. Other top awards for anomalous global warming go to the usual Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Siberia/Mongolia. The Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Warming Event goes to Africa's Angola coast; I did not expect to see it. I wonder if much like the warm ocean "blob: in Alaska in 2018 had an effect on the return of spawning anadromous fish such as salmon, if said red spot has had an effect on fishermen and their livelihoods. If that yellow "blob" in the Gulf of Alaska can decimate king and red salmon returns, I hate to think what has happened to Angola's fishermen and fisherwomen.
- Challenges:
ArcGIS Pro was giving me some trouble with sizing issues. That's why the maps were sized and aligned differently. Everytime I would move the scroll wheel on my mouse, the second map (the 1901-1930 map), it would zoom too far in or too far out. I tried zooming to the layer and zooming to the continent shapefile. Otherwise I would have happily designed them a lot better than this! The images also wouldn't fit as large on the Google Sites page as much as I would have liked it to. This is also my first time designing a website with a focus on design rather than function.
- Improvements I would like to make
I would like to fix the hierarchy; perhaps I should export the maps to PowerPoint and work on them there? I wasn't very proud of the end result. I would have rather made a balanced map with less Tahoma font for the subheadings. I also would like to get rid of the map frame so I can focus on the end design. I also would like to even out and align the maps and information better.
- Map Author, Date, and Sources:
Logan Bolan
1/27/2021
Round II
Global Temperature Averages Compared to Turn of the 20th Century Temperature Averages.pdfGlobal Temperature Averages Compared.pdf- Correct Symbology
Correct Symbology is important because then we can't see where the most important increases in temperature are.
Red and Blue contrast really well. Having three colors compared to five drastically reduces the nonsense and noise we don't need to see. It also looks more patriotic, which is essential for convincing large swaths of the American populace.
- Map Author, Date, and Sources:
Logan Bolan
1/28/2021