Tag: weather

  • Just a Thought About a Thing That’s Been Nipping at Me

    Just a Thought About a Thing That’s Been Nipping at Me

    The democratisation of design tools ostensibly allows people to create high-quality graphics. But I think we can all admit to ourselves we see a lot of work that…misses its mark. As a general rule, I do not often post work here by untrained designers. My peers and I have the benefit of education and experience…

  • Just a Little Axis if You Please

    Just a Little Axis if You Please

    In my last post, I commented upon a graphic from the Philadelphia Inquirer where a min/max axis line would have been helpful. This post is a quick follow-up of sorts, because a week ago I flagged something similar for me to perhaps mention on Coffee Spoons. So here I shall mention away. We have another…

  • A Warming Climate Floods All Rivers

    A Warming Climate Floods All Rivers

    Last weekend, the United States’ 4th of July holiday weekend, the remnants of a tropical system inundated a central Texas river valley with months’ worth of rain in just a few short hours. The result? The tragic loss of over 100 lives (and authorities are still searching for missing people). Debate rages about why the…

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

    I Need My Sharpie. Where’s My Sharpie?

    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…

  • The Great British Baking

    Recently the United Kingdom baked in a significant heatwave. With climate change being a real thing, an extreme heat event in the summer is not terribly surprising. Also not surprisingly, the BBC posted an article about the impact of climate change. The article itself was not about the heatwave, but rather the increasing rate of…

  • Small Dog Days of Summer

    For my readers in the northern hemisphere, which is the vast majority of you, we are in the middle of meteorological summer, the dog days. And whilst my UK and Europe readers continue to bake under temperatures greater than 40ºC (104ºF), the northeast United States and Philadelphia in particular is looking at a heatwave starting…

  • Turn Down the Heat

    First, as we all should know, climate change is real. Now that does not mean that the temperature will always be warmer, it just means more extreme. So in winter we could have more severe cold temperatures and in hurricane season more powerful storms. But it does mean that in the summer we could have…

  • Obfuscating Bars

    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…

  • Philadelphia’s Wild Winters

    Winter is coming? Winter is here. At least meteorologically speaking, because winter in that definition lasts from December through February. But winters in Philadelphia can be a bit scattershot in terms of their weather. Yesterday the temperature hit 19ºC before a cold front passed through and knocked the overnight low down to 2ºC. A warm…

  • Mapping the Mullica Hill Tornado

    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…