
In a class on using Python for data wrangling that my colleague Vicky and I taught recently for NYU Data Services, we made use of NOAA's Storm Events data recording storm incidents from 1950 to present. Not willing to set aside our practice dataset so soon after the class, I thought it would be worthwhile to get a glimpse of what this large dataset (over 1.3 million records) might look like from a spatial point of view. Because a change in reporting in the 1990s meant that the richness and detail of the NOAA data expanded greatly for the later decades of the storm events, I confined my rendering to the years before 1990. Furthermore, the possibilities of displaying storm paths as linestrings, enabled by the start and end location of tornado storm events, led me to limit the final display to just over 10,000 such records in the dataset for which those points had been provided..
The results can be found over on our departmental news site here.
The results can be found over on our departmental news site here.