maps – Page 53 – Coffee Spoons

The Polar Vortex…Or Not

If you live in the United States, you probably have heard the term polar vortex by now. People have been using the term to describe the bitterly cold temperatures affecting the eastern two-thirds of the country. But the term polar vortex is a meteorological term that means a specific phenomenon. In other words, it’s more than a hashtag along the lines of snowmageddon. The Washington Post explains what the polar vortex is.

My caveat for this piece is that from my understanding, it’s not entirely correct. Or perhaps not detailed enough. In brief, we turn to the National Weather Service out of New York for a more technically correct, but more poorly designed graphic.

Poor type, poor colours, poor hierarchy. Those are abundantly clear, but the important part is that the NWS wants to correct many of the popular misconceptions. Somewhere between the well-intended but less-than-entirely-clear Post piece and the accurate-but-also-unclear National Weather Service piece is an opportunity to explain the concept to the public.

Credit for the Washington Post piece goes to Bonnie Berkowitz, Richard Johnson, Katie Park, and Gene Thorp.

Credit for the National Weather Service goes to the graphics team at the National Weather Service of New York.

Holiday Tidings…of War

I’ve been away for over two weeks on holiday. So to spread good cheer to all, today I am sharing an image from a series of maps the BBC put together to try and explain the civil war in South Sudan.

Credit for the piece goes to BBC graphics department.

Travelling for the World Cup

Well, travel for the teams, not you. It’s a big issue in Brazil because unlike the last couple of times, the teams need to travel big distances to reach the cities where they play their matches. Thankfully, to explain just how far some of these distances are for some of these teams, Quartz put together a nice article with quite a few graphics.

This graphic in particular juxtaposes the travels of the US team and the Argentinian team. Who do you think has it easier?

Credit for the piece goes to Jason Karaian and Ritchie King.

Winds Across the World

Most of us have likely seen the wind map by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg. However, this new wind map takes the idea and makes it a bit more useful. It offers the user the opportunity to look at winds at different levels of the atmosphere. Or you can look at different projections. Some projections show wind patterns better than others. You can also see wind across the world, not just the United States.

Credit for the piece goes to Cameron Beccario.

Tracking You While You Text

Today’s post comes from the Washington Post, which looks at further revelations about the NSA surveillance programme. Specifically, the Post details how the NSA tracks Americans by what is called co-traveler analytics. The piece does a really nice job of explaining how the tracking works through illustrative examples.

Credit for the piece goes to the Washington Post graphics department.

The Long and Winding Cotton Production Path

Today’s piece is straightforward, but I felt very good at detailing its story. The Wall Street Journal mapped out the path cotton takes on its way from the fields to the denim in your jeans.

Cotton's path to market — Cotton’s path to market

Credit for the piece goes to the Wall Street Journal graphics department.

The Next Cold War?

The New York Times has a nice piece about the Arctic, which is increasingly fought over by the nations north of the Arctic Circle. Maps like these are always opportunities I enjoy to see the world in an infographic that is not a standard projection, e.g. Mercator or Robinson. The slight change in fill or opacity also serves to highlight the focus of the piece on the area north of the Arctic Circle while areas even more distant slowly fade to white.

Credit for the piece goes to Baden Copeland and Derek Watkins.

Old Healthcare Policy Renewal

Let’s start this week off with cartograms. Sometimes I like the idea, sometimes not so much. Here is a case where I really do not care for the New York Times’ visualisation of the data. Probably because the two cartograms, a before and after of health policy renewals, do not really allow for a great side-by-side comparison. I imagine there is probably a way of condensing all of that information into a single chart or graphic component.

Credit for the piece goes to Keith Collins, Josh Katz, Katie Thomas, Archie Tse, and Karen Yourish.

Cancelling the Cincinnati Streetcar Project

So Cincinnati was going to have a streetcar. Now it won’t because the recently elected mayor, John Cranley, campaigned on killing the streetcar. I won’t get into the whys and the why nots mostly because I’m not from Cincinnati and others can do it better. Suffice it to say that costs and budget battles played a part. Yesterday the city council opted to pause the project. This will likely suspend federal grant payments, meaning contractors don’t get paid, which means the city faces lawsuits for being in breach of contract, which potentially means the city spends almost as much money cancelling the project as they would completing it.

Ordinarily I would post something from a local newspaper or media outlet covering the story. But today I have the pleasure of sharing some work that my former professor made. His infographic explores the fiscal details of the streetcar project and how much Cincinnati owes if they opt to cancel it in the end.

Funding the Cincinnati Streetcar project

Credit for the piece goes to Giacomo Ciminello. You can download the original here. And you can visit his site here.

Speeding on Chicago’s Tollways

The Illinois Tollways will be raising speed limits starting 1 January. Part of that process includes researching current driving habits and patterns. This graphic by the Chicago Tribune looks at some of the results. While the map part is necessary to show the routes themselves and the limits on those routes, the more interesting part is the dot plot below.

Credit for the piece goes to the Chicago Tribune’s graphic department.