- Shirley Leung (shirleyswirley)
- Michelle Weirathmueller (michellejw)
- Helena van Tol (hmvantol)
- Philippe Vaillant (phvaillant)
- All group members contributed to the brainstorming and design process with Dargan Frierson (UW Atmospheric Sciences)
- Michelle and Philippe constructed the website framework and the animated globe interaction
- Shirley and Helena constructed the layout and interactive components of the contents inside the modal
- Helena collected the data and images for Athabasca and Lake Chad
- Shirley collected the data and images for Arctic sea ice and the California drought
- Michelle collected the data and images for the Gansu Solar Park
- Philippe collected the data and images for the Great Barrier Reef
- All group members worked on debugging and finalizing the details for the poster session
For our research process we surveyed existing climate change visualizations and the literature on climate change visualization. We interviewed Dargan Frierson for his vision of what features a climate change graphic should have and we brainstormed with him to develop those ideas into our current version. We decided to initally split up and work in pairs to develop different components of the graphic, but continued to communicate about major design decisions. In the end we merged our code and worked on integration and overall aesthetics.
Data collection and curation was a major component of our project. We wanted to find examples of global change where climate change was a major contributing factor. The data needed to be easy to understand without too much background information and also needed to be accompanied by satellite images. We looked for sites that were broadly distributed across the globe to show a variety of different effects.
One of the greatest challenges in visualizing climate change is how to accurately display multiple sources of variable data in a way that is convincing to the general public. Most audiences have difficulty interpreting the difference between variability and uncertainty and may not grasp what constitutes major change on a global scale. One solution to this problem would be to show data from the past and present accompanied by photographic images of landscapes that represent these changes. This visualization strategy necessarily requires curation by experts and could be supported by embedding links to the raw data or relevant publications into the graphic.
We would like to thank Dargan Frierson for helping us brainstorm about the overall design and message, and for assisting in the selection of potential locations.
Access our visualization at http://cse512-16s.github.io/fp-shirleyswirley-michellejw-hmvantol-phvaillant/index.html or download this repository and run python -m SimpleHTTPServer 9000 and access this from http://localhost:9000/.