The first half of my planned thoughts on Hurricanes and Data Visualisation, Rainbow’s Gravity and was published earlier back in September. Part two, Map Reading, joined it this month. In between, the first hurricane-centric article acquired an addendum, The Mona Lisa. With this post, the same has happened to the second article. Apparently you can’t keep a good hurricane story down.
One of our Hurricanes is missing
When I started writing about Hurricanes back in September of this year, it was in the aftermath of Harvey and Irma, both of which were safely far away from my native United Kingdom. Little did I think that in closing this mini-series Hurricane Ophelia (or at least the remnants of it) would be heading for these shores; I hope this is coincidence and not karma for me criticising the US National Weather Service’s diagrams!
As we batten down here, an odd occurrence was brought to my attention by Bill McKibben (@billmckibben), someone I connected with while working on this set of articles. Here is what he tweeted:
I am sure that inhabitants of both the Shetland Islands and the East Midlands will be breathing sighs of relief!
Clearly both the northward and eastward extent of Ophelia was outside of the scope of either the underlying model or the mapping software. A useful reminder to data professionals to ensure we set the boundaries of both modelling and visualisation work appropriately.
As an aside, this image is another for the Hall of Infamy, relying as it does on the less than helpful rainbow palette we critiqued all the way back in the first article.
I’ll hope to be writing again soon – hurricanes allowing!
From: peterjamesthomas.com, home of The Data and Analytics Dictionary
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