Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Search Challenge (11/19/14): How snowy is it this week?

SORRY about being late with the Challenge today.  



As you might have guessed, I'm traveling in the Northeast part of the United States, and let me tell you... it's COLD out there!  

But I'm not complaining, some places have been having a much more interesting time of it than I have.  Buffalo, NY, as you've probably seen on the news, is getting dumped on at a phenomenal rate. 

Of course, that makes me wonder...  And you know where this is going... 

This week's Search Challenge is another in our Data-Driven series.  Can you answer me this? 


1.  Can you make a map of showing how much snow has fallen this week in the Northeast of the US and the Southeast of Canada?  I'd love to see a map of roughly this region: 



.. showing (in whatever format you like) the total snow accumulation for the past week.  Let's pick the week of November 12 - 19, 2014.  At a minimum, we'll want to have snowfall data for Buffalo, Toronto, London (Ontario), Rochester, and Oswego.

To make this Challenge interesting, I'm not going to specify HOW you should show the data--I'll leave that to your design sensibility and inventiveness.  

When you send in your answer, be sure to include a link to your chart / graph / map.  I'll show my top three picks for best graphic on Friday.  (Or Saturday, if we get a bunch of them.)  

Your chart can be a simple histogram, or an interactive visualization with sliders, and everything.  It's up to you.  

Obviously, Step 1 will be finding the data source.  Once you've found that data, what you do with it is up to you.  

To keep the charts comparable, let's use metric measurements for the snow depth.   

I'm really curious to see what you'll come up with!  

Search on! 


27 comments:

  1. Hello Dr. Russell.
    So much snow makes life complicated and also beautiful. Just be safe with the cold and temperature changes.

    I was thinking, if possible that you give the answer on Monday, November 24th. That will help us to work with more time and you to be also not in a very close schedule. Just a suggestion.

    In any case, glad we have another SearchResearch Challenge.Thanks for always giving us your time too.

    Enjoy your trip.

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    1. Now THAT is an excellent idea. I'm going to be busy all day on Friday (speaking at the University of North Carolina), so it would certainly simplify my life to do so.

      Okay. Let's do it.

      Answer on Monday!

      (Thanks Ramón!)

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  2. Hello Dan,

    Seeing this challenge, I was wondering if you ever posted a solution for the "Mark Twain challenge" and I missed it or if it's still in the wings…

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    1. Nope.. you haven't missed it. I've actually done a lot of work (that ultimately went nowhere!)... but I'll report on it next week when I'll have a lot of time to do catchup articles. { Pre-warning: I'm not going to do a Challenge next week. It's Thanksgiving in the US, but I will be writing these catchup articles. }

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    2. Thanks, Dr. Russell, for the pre-warning.

      In this challenge, I have a question. Do we look for just one point or multiple ones. In Ann and Debbie map, they have some of the same values that I have. And those data are for just one point. In Buffalo, I believe they come from the airport.

      I had the same question that Debbie and Ann had. Lake effect is creating heavy snow storms and the data shows not enough snow.

      THE FOLLOWING ARE WEEK LONG SNOW TOTALS FROM MONDAY EVENING THROUGH
      FRIDAY MORNING. THIS INCLUDES BOTH ROUNDS OF HEAVY LAKE EFFECT SNOW
      THAT IMPACTED THE REGION.
      Source: A
      Buffalo, one point

      With [buffalo snowfall 2014] Found:
      Lake effect: The Buffalo Bills' game on Sunday against the New York Jets could be in jeopardy, as their stadium is buried under 220,000 tons of snow, according to the team Stadium is in Orchard Park And the link source A, says 71 inches. This link, much less.

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    3. I am trying to add more data to the chart. I thought at first using a map. However, we only have few points and that makes it harder to understand the values,

      This Chart shows snow in cm. for the single point data, not all the state or city.

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  3. Well, I easily found several maps of snowfall--in cm--but that's not quite what you want and my brain cell can't figure out anything else.

    A brilliant current topic though.

    jon tU

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  4. Anne and I created this map.

    The hardest part of the challenge for us was getting the snowfall amounts! We got the Canadian amounts by going to weather.com and getting historical data which connected to a Weather Underground site. We checked to see if there was any other sources that said they had different snow amounts during that time and didn't find any. The NY sites were a little more complicated only because the snowfall amounts varied so much by precise location. We started out using the weather.com information but then went to the National Weather Service to verify the amounts. Buffalo was the toughest one because one site would say one thing and another would have slightly differing amounts. We went with the National Weather Service but we were surprised by how low the snowfall amount was. We knew the storm was centered south of Buffalo so we did some searches on snow buffalo november and found information that it fell mostly in Erie County so we did a new search for erie county snowfall totals november and got this result from the National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office We looked through the various versions to get the place with the highest snowfall amount and we chose Cheektowaga. We created a google spreadsheet to total the amounts. Now we needed to visualize this data. If I had followed Anne's advice we would have gone straight to Google maps but I didn't listen. First we tried using Fusion Tables. Found our data from Google sheets didn't upload. Put it in Excel and it worked but then had trouble tweaking the map. So next I tried to find some online service that would create the visualized data for us and found a few sites, but they all had glitches. So then I went to Google maps and uploaded the Excel spreadsheet into Google maps. That part was easy. Converted the amounts to centimeters using Google. That was also easy. Then wanted an icon that would really show the massive amount of snow in Cheektowaga so searched for heavy snow icons and uploaded one into google maps. Found a different one for light snow. So hopefully this shows how much snowfall amounts varied in a very small area.

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    1. Love your map! Nicely done. In a future SRS, we'll have to explore what else you can do with Google Maps.

      I don't know why your data didn't upload to Fusion Tables. When things like this happen, I usually convert the file to plain text and start all over with the importation. That usually fixes it up.

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  5. Here's my link https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VyAsutxyzPL9bIFNF9OlGOqF1gNlqLM8hYM43jJ81oo/edit?usp=sharing
    to the spreadsheet I have so far. Quite frankly my results are less tha stellar and would make for a very boring map. My approach was to use for the Canadian cities the Climate Weather Services provided by the government. So for London and Ontario I have downloaded data (unedited) as my first source. In the case of the U.S. cities I found the NOAA and National Weather Service had lots of data for specific stations & I didn't know how best to gather data that would be comparable to others in our group.
    I switched over to Wunderground and initially used downloadable text data from Personal Weather Stations in the respective cities of Buffalo, Oswego & Rochester. But the numbers weren't making sense & the only indication was "precipitation" which I thought might mean snow but turned out it did not. So then I used the link to "historical weather" for all locations and got Total Snow Depth for each city. Again these numbers 0 - 15 cms don't match what we're hearing in the news. For example I've heard 5 feet deep and even if we adjust that for perhaps drifting and use 3 feet that is .9144 meters or approximately 100 cms. I will give it some more thought & I hope to have some time to work on it more.

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    1. I have this link to the NCDC (National Climatic Data Center ) part of NOAA showing the snowfall from Nov 15 to 21st 2014 in inches. I then overlaid this map in Google Earth to show more details. We can see in the west south west section of New York a maximum snowfall measurement of 69 inches (175 cm).


      https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LceJdyAmgrMhvz_Ng_ByFSHNzvvgGN2M7fSRSMjwcpw/edit?usp=sharing

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    2. Here's the original map link of NDCC http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/snow-and-ice/recent.php?period=7&region=30

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    3. Rosemary this is a great find! What did you use as your search terms?

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    4. My search query was quite basic [snowfall records] & 4th result on SERP was National Climatic Data Center. Selected 7 days and New York. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/snow-and-ice/
      I haven't given it a try but if I get some time I would take the highs and lows of snowfall in the state (essentially this maps database & create a map in Fusion/GoogleSheet using the "heatmap" function because for the large area we are looking at it would likely highlight best the five cities. If we were just zooming in on Buffalo area then contour lines as already mentioned would show the extent of the band of snow that swept through the region. Debbie as you mentioned the areas hit were not widespread.

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  6. I can find charts with the accumulated snowfall for points in New York State and Ontario. Not an easy task but possible.

    What I can not find is a free way to convert map point data into contour lines, which is the way I believe to be the best visualization.

    Also, I found a name for contour lines with equal amounts of precipitation (isohyets or isohyetal lines) but I can't find a similar word or expression for equal amounts of snow (which is a type of precipitation). It should be something like "isochionic lines" or "isoniphs" (from χιών [chion] = snow, or νιφάς [niphas] = snowflake in Classical Greek).

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    1. For a contour plot, probably the simplest is Mike Bostock's code to do this. See: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4241134

      I like your suggested term: "isoniphs."

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  7. I have downloaded the data from Weather Undergrond and saved to .csv files. Still looking for a way to make a map from the data.

    While searching I found this other part of Weather Underground to show an animation of an area. I changed the settings and did this. The purple markers are personal weather stations showing precipitation total. It made me wonder, how big does a weather reporting device need to be to measure 182.88cm or do people use meter sticks and hand enter the data?
    http://wxug.us/1lq6i

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  8. Fred, you are exactly correct about the meter stick and data entry technique and tools. Friday I met an actual meteorologist, not just a presenter. Recently retired from 30 years with Environment Canada, He described exactly the method you mention.

    I tried to get him interested in our Challenge but he declined having already his entire weekend spoken for.

    jon tU

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  9. Luis, I suspect contour lines will not help because my meteorologist pal shows that the snow came in bands according to the length of time spent blasting across the warm lake waters. Some of the easily found maps hint at this

    jon tU

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  10. I have not found an answer for this yet. I did find this post today by Google Maps Mania on Wikipedia Heat Maps.

    Using Frankenplace I did a search for [ lake effect snow ] and created this map
    Frankenplace Map [ lake effect snow ]

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    1. FREDONIA/DUNKIRK RULES
      used [snowfall buffalo, ny usa] to try the frankenplace tool out - but not sure how useful the results are - no indication of when/how much, etc.… but it looks nice — Buffalonia is still glowing, but so soggy… maybe features of the FrankenMap are eluding me…

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  11. @Fred, fabulous! That is exactly the kind of map I wanted. I'm short of time now but I'll try to understand how you did that later on tonight.

    @jon, I'm afraid I don't understand exactly what you mean. As Fred's Frankenplace map shows, contour lines are possible and very intuitive (assuming the map is correct).

    My brother is a top meteorologist. Unfortunately this week he didn't have any time to deal with this.

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  12. We also created a map in fusion maps https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1pgg42AVwmdWpdom2wbW6WzmR67tA4T8FyWHwD-6O
    Would love to create a heat map but that is looking complicated to do so that may be for a later time!

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  13. Nice map Fred. I would really like to understand better how to work with APIs. Heres a link to World Weather that has a free api. It looks like you can get all the historical weather back to 2008. I think this would be very useful.

    http://www.worldweatheronline.com/premium-weather.aspx?menu=historical

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  14. Just want to do a little re-focusing here. The map I created above DOES NOT create a heat map based on snowfall totals. Maps mania describes it as:
    "Frankenplace is a 'thematic map search engine.' Which means that you can use the map to create instant heat-maps for a range of words based on the words' frequency in over 1.6 million articles on Wikipedia and online travel blog entries."

    It just shows geographic mention of the words [ lake effect snow ].

    I apologize for getting folks off track.

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    1. A great diversion, though. It reminds us to pay close attention to the details of what's going on. (When I saw the map, I was wondering how you got all that data for snowfall all over the country!)

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  15. Learning much from this challenge. Fred thank you for sharing Frankenplace map.

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