Climate data analysis – ways of representing data
Jason Morgan demonstrates some of the functions of Google Data Studio. Jason uses information from the No Rain Days dataset to show different ways to visualise data.
Climate data analysis – an introduction – navigating the home page and filtering by location and date.
Climate data analysis – specific weather data – exploring how to drill down into specific datasets.
Climate data analysis – greenhouse gas and ozone data – filtering by sector and level to move from broad datasets to more specific datasets.
Transcript
Jason Morgan
We’re looking at some of the other functions. In this case, we’re looking at our page 4 of No Rain Days. We have our map here, the data is showing all the information that has been collected, so we need to sort it. I’m going to start off with year, and I’m going to pick a very wonderful year – I’m going to pick 1975. So now I have only data for 1975, and we have all of our locations present. I can explore and see the number of no rain days. For example, I hover over here – in Gisborne, there were 158.64 no rain days – interesting fact.
I can now also scroll in and just like before go and visit these locations by dragging my little person around and going to satellite mode. It’s a great way to see parts of New Zealand that maybe we haven’t visited before.
However, the main reason I’m showing you this data here is, on the right-hand side, we have a different way of representing the data depending on intensity and size of the box telling us the number of no rain days. So here we’re getting a feel where you can see Milford Sound and Dunedin are over here and Napier, Tara Hills, Lake Tekapo are up here. This allows me to give a visual representation of the data, and we can work out the size of the areas. So it’s another way that students can explore the data.
Now we’re looking at extreme rainfall. Extreme rainfall events have a very specific definition in weather, and I think it’s really important that the students go away and research and explore these.
Once again, we have to process the data ourselves. You’ll notice this data is all based on the 1st of January 1971 here, so we can click what year we would like to explore. So I’m going to explore 1976. So now I’m just looking at 1976 in terms of extreme events. I’m going to look at days where we had maximum precipitation only. So now I’m exploring this data and I can see the maximum precipitation.
If I want to see very wet days, it will give me the number of very wet days. And you can see that this data here has now become difficult to see – so again, we move into our zoom-in mode to be able to explore it a little bit better and we get a feel for the number of days.
We can also explore very wet precipitation by proportion, and these have specific definitions in the context of weather. By clicking on the map, we can explore the number of data points. We also compare two locations just by going down our locations.
Acknowledgements Video footage and narration by Jason Morgan Ministry for the Environment Stats NZ
