'This is just the beginning': How high heat of 2021 drove catastrophic weather

This is an enterprise-length article with multiple graphics (one shown to left) that I pitched, reported out, wrote, and did the data analysis/visualization for. The graphics and narrative voices in the article intertwine to capture both the scientific and human elements of what climate change looks like in action. To craft this piece I interviewed leading climate scientists and those who bore the brunt of some of the most extreme weather events across the world in 2021.

I spoke with a small business owner who watched the catastrophic floods ravage his hotel in Germany, a vineyard owner who watched frosts destroy his crop in France, and a woman who lost her brother to the extreme heat in Canada. In the Pacific Northwest, I also spoke with members of minority communities disproportionately impacted by extreme weather, including the climate policy manager of a union for farmworkers and Latino families, a previous member of the homeless population in Portland, and woman who struggles with disabling migraines in Alberta.

On the technical side, I designed multiple static and interactive map-based visualizations. The visualization on the left required me to reduce the size of large GRIB datasets without losing significant resolution. I did this with a pipeline that converted them to raster files, vectorized them, simplified the geometries, and converted them to topojsons that I then animated together with d3.js. There were multiple sophisticated CRS-related problems that I resolved using a series of masks and reprojections.

For the second graphic in the article I used CURL commands embedded in a Python script to scrape the NOAA temperature records that are visualized in the map.