Visualizing Gustav and Evacuee Education
Hilary Spencer
Monday, 01 September 2008 11:31 UTC
Stamen (known for many other visualization projects including Trulia Hindsight, MySociety Time Travel maps, and a number of projects at Digg Labs) has teamed up with MSNBC to create a visualization of Hurricane Gustav.
The visualization, built on top of Microsoft’s Live Earth, is animated and exploratory, showing the path of the storm through the Caribbean. A rotating eye-like icon rotates faster in order to represent wind-speed increases, making it easy to see where the hurricane picked up speed (poor Cuba). The gradient surrounding the path of the storm illustrates the extent of the storm’s influence (i.e. where is receiving 40+ mph winds).
One can compare this to the NOAA’s (rather bland) map of Gustav
Could better visualizations help potential evacuees understand the consequences of the storm? Among other factors, perceptions of hurricane impact caused many people not to evacuate before Katrina. Would a better visualization have emphasized Katrina’s potential for devastation?
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Replies
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A better visual map would be to use stats on destructive impact of previous hurricanes, to predict the potentional devasation of future hurricanes via it’s catagory.
Why is it called Gustav?
I read somewhere a hurraine is usually given a woman’s name, but later in the 70s male named hurricanes were introduced.
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Stormpulse is another site offering hurricane visualization tools, and Google Earth now has hurricane data for 2008.
(via Infoaesthetics)
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