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Are We Dying Yet?

A Climate Change Weather App Visualizing 125 Years of Data

There is already an overwhelming amount of information on climate change — How can we help the audience overcome climate-fact fatigue and engage on a topic that is seemingly saturated and almost too familiar?

Are We Dying Yet? is a weather app that highlights the relationship between weather and climate, and presents climate change information in a local-individual context. The app shows you current weather information, as well as temperature change in the last 125 years.

︎︎︎ Launch Project (Mobile Only)
Design • Development
Company: Fathom Information Design (Internal Project)

Dataset


I first decided on NOAA’s Global Historical Climatology Network’s daily summaries and monthly dataset (GHCN-daily/GHCN-monthly) after consulting Dr. Randall Cerveny, Rapporteur on Extreme Records for the United Nations/World Meteorological Organization. I wanted to use a global database as I hope the project could expand from a Euro-American centric worldview, especially when climate change has more severe impacts in countries in the tropics than the developed north. 

I worked with Mark Schifferli at Fathom to parse and organize the data. Despite my intent to use the GHCN-monthly data, the organization of precipitation and temperature datasets would add much complexity to the data parsing process, so instead, we chose the U.S. county based Climate Divisional Database (nClimDiv), which offers much granularity. We also gathered global weather data from NOAA and Berkeley Earth to offer a local vs. global perspective.

Process & Sketches


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