Snowpocalypse + Icepocalypse 2014: A Retrospective

It was a cold winter... just how I like it. I've enjoyed a cool spring season, only having just turned on the A/C now in June, and I thank the winter for that. We got a few snows in the South, and not just light dustings! Here's my car to prove it.

Okay, so that's not that impressive.. how about a snowman?

 

Alright, so there's no snow on the driveway he's sitting on, and the Jaguar he's blocking has been snow-graffiti'd. What about this snow that stuck on the road for multiple days??

At the very start of it all, I visited Toccoa Falls, and even IT was frozen over (or at least the water in its pool)!

That's all the photographic evidence I have to show for our multiple snows. There were lots of carefully thought-out drawings on cars (as the one on the Jaguar) and some guy named Richard wrote his nickname in the snow on top of one of the UGA buildings. Fortunately, I didn't experience the Great Atlanta Snag, wherein the highways iced over and completely scrambled rush-hour traffic. (Atlanta traffic is hellish enough on its own, as is driving on ice. Put them together, and it's a perfect recipe for utter chaos and disaster.) I'm also fortunate that there's no photo evidence of me sledding down a hill in a laundry basket.

The cost of gas to heat the house was out the roof, so I set onto some crafty projects wherein I sewed old t-shirts into rugs. The moral of this story is that I would like more winters like this one, and I am happy that I chose to live within walking distance of my office, perilous though the walk was a few days.

Fun with GIS

I'm trying to beef up my GIS portfolio in hopes of finding an awesome full-time position somewhere (anyone?). And naturally I'm doing this by having a little fun, that is, by doing some small and easy yet interesting projects. I found a really nice collection of links to data repositories (located here), with collections ranging from precipitation and temperature maps to land cover and health. It's just a matter of figuring out what to do with it all.

So I started out with an observational exercise: looking at the difference in precipitation levels across the US over the past half century. For being so simple, it's actually pretty telling stuff, and it at least seems to match with observations people have made in the Southeaster-ly parts of the country, namely that many bodies of water were once regularly higher than they are today after our near-annual droughts.

Caveats: the precipitation data from the PRISM project is part of a research project that models precipitation for entire areas based on a small number of actual measurements; while that idea makes me put on my skeptical face, PRISM is apparently considered some of the best data out there. However, the data is not awesomely labeled; I believe the numbers in all the data files were in millimeters but wouldn't stake my life on it based on the lack of metadata. Furthermore (and here's the iffiest part).. the data files are averaged over a period of years. There's a file of averages from 2005-2009, 2000-2004, 1995-1999, 1990-1994, and.. 1961-1990. Yeah.

So the difference displayed by this map is between average precipitation levels during 2005-2009 and average precipitation levels during 1961-1990. No fancy intermediate averages or anything like that, just comparing the average levels during those two sets of time. Open it up and have a look!

I'll likely be posting these sorts of things on a regular basis, so check them out or contribute your own ideas, data, and maps!