Translation Device: Weather Forecasts

Description

With this sketch I want to take information about the impact of climate change and make it more viseral and real for people in their everyday lives. I believe this may help people be more conscious of the ways in which our environment is changing and help bring some more clarity when people feel like the weather is different than it used to be, but don't quite comprehend how much it has changed. I hope the more people are thinking about the environment and understanding how it is changing in their everyday lives, the more likely people will be willing make different choices in their everyday lives and in who they want to represent them in tackling the problem. I also want this sketch to show the different possibilities for the future and how their lives might be impacted based on the choices humanity makes going forward. Key to this is not just creating a data visualization of weather and climate data, but a "viseralization" that engages viewers emotionally to encourage a stronger response to the data.

Design Process

Part of the inspiration for this forecast comes from my college fraternity days when I was assigned to write up a weather report for everyone in the fraternity. It started out as just a simple weather forecast email, but over time evolved into a much more elaborate brief with style recommendations, an inspirational quote, funny youtube video, and other extra details. Having a weather forecast that was more than just numbers resulted in a more impactful and memorable experience for those who recieved it, oftening help start people's day off on a light hearted note. I want to recreate this experience in a new context so as to bring what would be unrelatable climate data back to earth in a way that people can engage with and remember, using the principles of data feminism.

Initial sketches

The main APIs I chose to look at for this were the NASA landsat API, the OpenWeatherMap API, and the global-warming.org API.

Reflection

I realized after spending a lot of time setting up my sketch to try and go between two APIs to geocode a city or place into longitude and latitude coordinates to use for the landsat imagery, another API I wanted to use for sourcing realtime weather data also output the geocode of the city so I didn't need to do all of the work I did previously. I'm also still playing around with the best way to incorporate the climate model data from the NOAA since I don't think I can access the data in realtime through the web browser, so I'm working with the data in python to extract a few different kinds of information to incorporate into the sketch. Since I wasn't able to work with the data from NOAA in real time for this project and the data supplied from Open Weather Map didn't go back far enough on either the free or paid accounts, I did some more hunting and was able to find the global-warming.org api to give me relavent climate change data to display to the user instead. I was happy with the data this let me access, with the acception of the ice cap coverage area which being in the millions of square kilometers, has an additional 10 decimal places that I am still working on removing. Since I could get the NOAA climate model data to show in the sketch as well, I chose to tint the landsat image red as way to visually convey the changing climate in a different but still relevant way.