Thousand Year Flood

I completed this project for Cornell's EAS 2900: Introduction to Programming for Meteorology and Climate Science course in Fall 2022. The goal was to choose a weather event of interest, find relevant atmospheric datasets, and analyze the data to draw conclusions about what drove the event.

I chose to look into the 2013 Colorado Front Range Flood, a natural disaster in which record-breaking levels of rainfall led to devastating flash floods and rainfall the week of September 9, 2013. Some areas received about a year's worth of rainfall in the span of just a few days - a one in a thousand year flood event.

NetCDF datasets on regional atmospheric conditions at the time were obtained from the University of Wyoming's Wyoming Weather Web and analyzed with Python to explore how significant atmospheric anomalies contributed to the flooding. After writing several Python functions to clean, restructure, and visualize the data, I produced filled contour plots displaying temperature and geopotential height at 500 hPa in the region during the height of the flooding. I also created a function to graph the changes in these two variables over a three-week period in a time plot.