Yesterday I wrote about a Philadelphia Inquirer article, which included an interactive display showing different monitoring stations around the Philadelphia area cataloguing just how bad the Minnesota/Canadian wildfire smoke is in the region. I noted during my piece that it was unclear if the little bars were actually recording the AQI values or just a generic bar indicating the category of how bad things were.
Turns out, they do record the actual values. But as I noted, because of the design decision to run them in long, very short rows, users cannot see the difference between the reports.
So after dinner—and a bit this morning in lieu of breakfast—I decided to make my own data visualisation application that shows the current value and the historical data for 12 select cities. The Inquirer version used specific monitoring stations, I am using the EPA’s reporting areas, which aggregates data over a larger area. I chose that approach because 11 of the 12 cities I chose represent the largest metropolitan areas for recipients of my annual printed Christmas cards—Philadelphia and Chicago, you still dominate by far. The last was for one particular friend who reads this site frequently—you know who you are.
The chart will eventually fill in with data as the hours and days and weeks roll on, but for now at least the 12 cities have data since my first data pull post-dinner yesterday. Though given the rushed nature of my work, any errors or issues are on me and not the EPA.
These city views are the detail version, but I have a sketch of a small multiples matrix display of the 12 cities that will serve as an overview/introduction. (And, yes, Virginia, it does default to Philadelphia.) I will have to implement the design later though, and for now the city detail version only switches city via dropdown selector. There are a number of glaring design issues I need to work through—glaring to me at least—but the data works and that is the most important thing to me at the moment.
Happy Friday, everyone. Time for a peated Scotch this evening? Too soon?
Credit for the piece is mine.