Tag: National Weather Service

  • I Need My Sharpie. Where’s My Sharpie?

    I Need My Sharpie. Where’s My Sharpie?

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    by

    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    Because who does not recall the great Sharpie forecast track by the National Hurricane Center (NHC)? Earlier this summer, in the middle of the hurricane season, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) NHC released a new, experimental warning cone map. For those unfamiliar, these are the maps that have a white and white-shaded forecast…

  • Dots Beat Bars

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    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    Today is just a quick little follow-up to my post from Monday. There I talked about how a Boston Globe piece using three-dimensional columns to show snowfall amounts in last weekend’s blizzard failed to clearly communicate the data. Then I showed a map from the National Weather Service (NWS) that showed the snowfall ranges over…

  • Obfuscating Bars

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    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    On Friday, I mentioned in brief that the East Coast was preparing for a storm. One of the cities the storm impacted was Boston and naturally the Boston Globe covered the story. One aspect the paper covered? The snowfall amounts. They did so like this: This graphic fails to communicate the breadth and literal depth…

  • Mapping the Mullica Hill Tornado

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    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    When the remnants of Hurricane Ida rolled through the Northeast two weeks ago, here in the Philadelphia region we saw catastrophic flooding from deluges west of the city and to the east we had a tornado outbreak in South Jersey. At a simplistic level we can attribute the differences in outcomes to the path of…

  • Texas-scale Cold

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    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    The middle third of the United States sits under some pretty cold Arctic air, helping to bring frozen precipitation, i.e. snow, to places unfamiliar with it, most notably Texas. I say unfamiliar, but Texas is also negligently unprepared. There are photos circulating the internet of Texarkana, a city straddling the Texas–Arkansas border, of the Arkansas…

  • Double Your Hurricanes, Double Your Fun

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    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    In a first, the Gulf of Mexico basin has two active hurricanes simultaneously. Unfortunately, they are both likely to strikes somewhere along the Louisiana coastline within approximately 36 hours of each other. Fortunately, neither is strong as a storm named Katrina that caused a mess of things several years ago now. Over the last few…

  • The Map

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    I mean come on, guys, did you really expect me to not touch this one? Well we made it to Friday, and naturally in the not so serious we have to cover the sharpie map. Because, if the data does not agree with your opinions, clearly the correct response is to just make shit up.…

  • Snowfall in Philadelphia

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Today, 9 February, it finally snowed significantly here in Philadelphia. In Chicago it probably snowed shortly after I moved out in September. Today’s graphic is a forecast map from philly.com using National Weather Service (NWS) data. I fail to understand the divergent palette—to be fair this is not the only instance of it throughout the meteorological…

  • The Polar Vortex…Or Not

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    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    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…