Climate data analysis – specific weather data
Jason Morgan demonstrates some of the functions of Google Data Studio. Jason shows us how to drill down into specific weather datasets, using growing degrees, fire risks and frosts datasets as examples.
Climate data analysis – an introduction – navigating the home page and filtering by location and date.
Climate data analysis – ways of representing data – exploring Data Studio functions/ways to visual data.
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
When we come to page 12, 13, 14 and so on, we’re looking at very specific weather data. And here we’re looking at the analysis of growing degrees. Growing degrees works on the baseline of two temperatures, so we first identify which temperature section that we want to explore – greater than 10° or greater than 5°. I’m going to go for greater than 10°. Clicking on ‘only’, now I’m beginning to find the data a little bit easier.
My next point is I want to look at a particular year, so I look at a start date for that year, and again, just like some of the other data we’ve explored, beginning at the start of the year, scrolling down, let’s have a look at 2001. Here we have our visual representation and we can see the difference – huge number of growing degrees in the North Island and becoming less and less. Some of these circles are rather large, so by clicking on the graph, I can move in and just to see better representation of the data, explore these areas and find out the number of growing degrees there were and also learn more about those locations using our little friend that we can drag behind to explore.
When we move to some of the other pages here, we’re starting to see some other specific data occur. So here we’re looking at fire risk. And again, we have our graph coming up and our picture coming up. The first thing I’m going to do is select for my date range here, and I’m going to explore this a little bit differently. I want to go back in time, and I want to look at 1973 and my end date will be 1974 and apply in my greyed-out button. So now I’m looking at the fire risk between 1973 and 1974. We have some fuel types that we can select, so we can have grass or forest fires. We can also look at the type of fire danger – extreme or very high – and we can even explore individual locations. So again, this is where we play around with our filters to explore the data and find out better.
Now we have our wind data and the same events. The first thing is I’m going to do is select the year I’m going to explore. I’m going to select 1978 this time. Select ‘only’. So now I’m looking at 1978, I can select the type of wind that I’m exploring – average, days above 99th percentile and the maximum wind speed. Let’s look at the maximum wind speed only.
So now I can start to explore that data. I can also explore certain months inside that data. I can also look to compare two locations, and I’m afraid to say if anyone’s out there from Wellington, we are going to have to look at Wellington and I would also like to compare it to Hamilton. So now I’ve got my two locations, and we can see the difference in the size of the circles. Hopefully that will give us a bit more of an idea of comparisons.
And clicking on my button up here, I’m looking at frost, and this is a really interesting one for me. This is from the first frost to the last frost, and the size of the circle represents our frost period. So again, I’m going to select a data range from here. And I’m going to go back in time and have a look at 1988 to 1989 and click the grey ‘Apply’ out button. We can see our frost periods are huge. Again, we actually have to explore these a little bit differently. Let's have a look at just 1981 – make life a little bit easier. I’m going to have to now zoom in and explore, and we can certainly see some of these frost periods are large and others are incredibly small. It’s a great way for the students to compare. So I can now click on the full-screen toggle view, and – give it a second – now we have our position that we can explore in a bit more detail, and I can certainly drag our little friend on and see what’s it like there.
It tells me I’m in the middle of the forest somewhere. It’s an amazing bit of software.
Acknowledgements Video footage and narration by Jason Morgan Ministry for the Environment Stats NZ
