Lately, I rediscovered my love for data visualization and mapping.

As I get more and more news stories about extreme weather events in my feeds, I’ve been wondering about how to make impactful visualizations to communicate how our weather patterns are changing. I recently discovered the now discontinued Storm Events Database and made a very simple chart tracking floods in Virginia Beach, an area prone to frequent floods.

Flood, Flash Flood, and Coastal Flood events in Virginia Beach

While yes, the chart shows that there has been an increase in reported flood events over the last 30 years, I’m aware that reporting standards may have changed. I’m wondering if there’s a better way to show the increase in extreme weather events.

I also recently discovered the amazing Iowa Mesonet, an archive of environmental data from a large collection of observational sites.

This was just a quick experiment, I’m hoping this will just be the start of a longer term project.