Introduction
I’m going to keep this article very short. Watch the video shown below to learn how to better understand the temperature variations that exist where you live and to decide if you are living in a global warming zone.
I have created a Tableau dashboard that will allow you to see if you live in a zone that is being impacted by global warming. The data I have included in this dashboard is currently only for North America, but I’m going to make a world-wide data set soon.
The Instructional Video On How To Use the Dashboard
I invite you to watch the following video that shows how I use dashboards to investigate the spatial and temporal changes in air temperature over the past 50 years. This data set has over 4,700 monitoring stations included from countries all around the world that had data from the 1960s to now. In subsequent work, I added all the other monitoring stations available, which brought the total to over 12,100 monitoring stations world-wide.
The Tableau Public Workbook
Click here to visit this workbook on Tableau Public. Download it had use it to learn a little about temperature variation on our beautiful planet. If you want to learn more about the work that lead up to the creation of this tool, read the articles shown below.
Previous Work
The basis of this work started with a five-part series that I affectionately refer to as my “Alteryx manifesto”. This series is accessible via the links shown below. This series teaches you how to process and use the daily weather data that was available before Trump became president (LOL!).
If you are able to complete the work outlined in that series, you can say that you are able to work with a fairly high level of competence in modern-day, self-service data analytics.
During the past several months, I once again began working with Alteryx and Tableau to gain a better understanding of climate change. Here are the articles that have lead up to the creation of this work.
- Investigating Global Climate Change
- Uncovering Surprising Temperature Changes
- Visualizing Worldwide Air Temperature Changes
- Visualizing Warming and Cooling Patterns in North America
- Descriptive and Predictive Study of North American Air Temperature Changes
- This Article
Final Thoughts
I can’t ever remember having more fun writing awesome Alteryx workflows to crush a lot of data followed by building fantastically functional Tableau workbooks to uncover the truth. I did all of this work with the data and even writing these articles with absolutely nobody caring about it! I love that.
I’ve learned so much in the process of doing this work that it has been worth the effort. I have enjoyed learning about weather variability over time. I now I have a much better understanding of how things are changing and how difficult it is to predict what is coming next. For the 10 of you that will eventually read this, thanks and I hope you enjoy the Tableau workbook!
Finally, how can you determine if global warming is occurring where you live? Well, look at the temperature trends in your region. Look at all the monitoring stations and see if there is a pervasive pattern that has been established. Have the temperatures steadily risen more than 1 deg F over the past 50 years? If so, you are probably living in a place that is changing rapidly. A pattern like that shown in the second dashboard below (Alaska) indicates that some serious changes in temperature have been happening there.
