Thoughts/Interesting Notes

Things we found interesting:

Initially coming into this project, we didn't know too much about the specifics and the nitty-gritty trends when it came to hurricanes. By looking at hurricanes from these two major oceans, we were able to learn so much about these natural phenomenons and while looking at the data/visualizations, we as a group were able to find some interesting pieces of information.

First off, we found that according to our data, a lot more hurricanes take place in the Atlantic compared to the Pacific. When we looked at the specific timeframe of when these hurricanes appear, we saw a majority of them do appear in the months of August to October. This trend not only was true for Atlantic hurricanes but for those in the Pacific as well. The hurricanes didn't occur much in the winter or spring months for these two oceans and began to pick up in the latter summer months when the weather started to cool down but not to frigid temperatures.

When it came to the number of hurricanes occurring since 2005, we found that there were no real outliers of years. What we mean by this is that there is no specific time period where an absurd high or low number of hurricanes were recorded. While there were some dips and increases from year to year, there were no real significant changes. The only dip would mentioning is the one from 2006 to 2007. One trend we found a bit interesting was that over the past couple of years (from 2014 to 2018), there have been a higher number of hurricanes occurring than the previous eight years. We found greater peaks in the past four years in terms of recorded hurricanes than the rest of the dataset used in the graph.

The categorization numbers for each of the hurricanes were particularly intriguing to look at. Especially given it was also grouped by where they occurred.

Regardless of the year and where they came from, we found a majority of hurricanes to be labeled as category 1 Hurricanes. The further we went up the scale, the less common they became, for both sets of oceans. This seemed like a logical conclusion as the majority of hurricanes were not disastrous in terms of their wind speed and subsequently, did not cause as much damage.

When it came to which ocean the hurricane belonged to (or occurred in), we did not find any particular trends for this. Mostly because as you shifted through the years (especially the 2010's), the numbers began to shift back and forth towards each ocean having the majority in each category. For example in one year we would have the Atlantic with the majority of the hurricanes, hence taking up more space in the bar graph. But then we would have the Pacific do the same for a different year. To show this, we have screenshots from the year 2018 and 2017. There was a switch in which ocean ended up having more higher category hurricanes despite the Atlantic having the lead in category 1 hurricanes in both graphs.

For the maps which showed the the path in which these hurricanes took, there were similarities when it came to both oceans but some aspects which made them unique. For the Atlantic ocean, we found that a majority of oceans started north and traveled down towards North and Central America. But a lot of these hurricanes curved around places such as Florida and then ended in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.

This wasn't exactly the case for hurricanes in the Pacific Ocean. They tended to start in the middle of the Pacific and go east towards Central America. There they would stop and not curve back towards the ocean, like we saw with the Atlantic. As a group, we thought that this was an interesting as for two different oceans, the hurricanes in each took different paths. We thought the reason behind this might be the amount of land surrounding these two oceans. There is a lot less land encompassing the Pacific than it is with the Atlantic.

When it came to the wind speed and pressure graphs, we found a similar trend to be occurring. When oceans hurricanes were higher in max speed, the opposite tended to be true for pressure and vice versa. For example in 2018, when looking at the wind speeds for the Atlantic Ocean, they tended to be quite high but the opposite was true for their pressure, which according to the graph, was pretty low.

Overall, we found the results/trend from our visualizations to be pretty interesting. At the start of the project, the data seemed a bit complicated and trends were hard to spot. But as we cleaned up the data and set up our visualizations, the overall trends seemed to form and come to light. We found what certain paths on the map a hurricane could take depending on which ocean occurred in as well as what months in the year we should expect a majority of hurricanes to pop up.