Category: Visualization

Categories
Design Miscellaneous Visualization

Colors? What Colors?

I have to admit that I am not completely color blind, but I have some issues with red and green. I only recognize a 17 in the image below. Others – I am told – also see a 42.

Maybe this is why I opted for a clear black and white contrast in the re-launch of my website. After seeing the image below, I am even happier that I choose an easy and not ambiguous color scheme.

Colors can be deceptive. Look at this and decide whether you see balls of different colors.

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/another-brain-frying-optical-illusion-what-color-are-these-spheres

If you believe that the balls are of different colors – shades of blue, red, and green – then you are not color blind, but the whole optical illusion worked.

Frankly, I could not believe it. I really had to test it with the pipette tool in Powerpoint (not any fancy graphical applications). Here are the colors of the top row of the balls (the ones that are cut off a bit):

Categories
Sustainability Visualization

Glaciers Then and Now

Taking up yesterday’s post and the notion of small multiples introduced by Edward Tufte in his Visual Display of Quantitative Information, I’d like to highlight another excellent interactive visualization of climate change. This time the melting of glaciers.

The Guardian’s Niko Kommenda has an excellent piece on this.

The illustration highlights how the outlines of the 90 largest and most surveyed glaciers shrink over the course of a couple of generations.

Categories
Sustainability Uncategorized Visualization

New Normals

This is not about the New Normal that is often mentioned when we discuss the future in the wake of the Covid-pandemic.

This is about the visualization of the shifts in average temperature for the US. This highlights pretty impressively how the temperature has changed over the last since 1901.

Every 10 years, NOAA – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – redefines “normal” weather (in terms of rainfall, temperature, and other characteristics of the climate). The base for each re-definition is the preceding 30-year window.

Now let’s have a look at the temperature to get an impression of global warming.

Annual U.S. temperature compared to the 20th-century average for each U.S. Climate Normals period from 1901-1930 (upper left) to 1991-2020 (lower right). Places where the normal annual temperature was 1.25 degrees or more colder than the 20th-century average are darkest blue; places where normal annual temperature was 1.25 degrees or more warmer than the 20th-century average are darkest red. Maps by NOAA Climate.gov, based on analysis by Jared Rennie, North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies/NCEI. Image is from https://climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-and-1991-2020-us-climate-normals

Rebecca Lindsay’s contribution has answers to some of the most immediate questions:

Is global warming affecting the Normals? (Yes). Are the Normals adjusted to “subtract out” global warming? (No.)  So the new normal reflects our changing climate? (Yes). Then how do we keep track of what used to be normal? (Different analyses.)

The influence of long-term global warming is obvious: the earliest map in the series has the most widespread and darkest blues, and the most recent map has the most widespread and darkest reds. Today, the normal annual temperatures across the country are warmer than the 20th-century average virtually everywhere. From 1901-1930, the annual average temperature was mostly colder than the 20th-century average.

For me, this is a brilliant presentation of data. This visualization really helps us to understand that something dramatic is going on.

By the way. The visualization is so impressive because it uses small multiples introduced by Edward Tufte in his Visual Display of Quantitative Information. In this case, the small multiples assist us in tracking temperature development across time and space.