Hurricanes

Created as both a work project for the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research and as a a final project for Cornell's INFO 4310: Interactive Information Visualization course in Spring 2024, this webpage uses D3.js, scroll-based interactivity, and design inspired by modern long-form journalism in order to tell a story about the relationship between rising sea temperatures and hurricane formation.

Coded with one other person, my main responsibility was implementing the map of sea surface temperatures (SST) as well as the text narrative. Sea surface temperature datasets were obtained from NOAA as global monthly NetCDF files from 1850 to the present.

Heavy preprocessing was done with Python in order to aggregate the data into decadal averages. The resulting NetCDF files were converted to GeoJSON with a custom Python script, then passed to the browser to visualize with d3-hexbin.

A major motivation behind the design of this project was making a project that followed the "scrollytelling" form seen in many recent web interactives produced by journalistic outlets such as the New York Times. Using scrolling as the main mode of interactivity, these kinds of visualizations can link graphics to information in a way that ultimately guides a reader through a narrative.