Cloudiness Trends for the 2017 Solar Eclipse

Planning an excursion to see the upcoming solar eclipse? NASA can help with that! They provide two sets of data which can point you to good viewing:

A little bit of R scripting lets us combine these and put them onto a Leaflet map of the US.

Downloads

Before coding, there are two things to download:

Displaying weather data from the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN)

In our previous blog posts, we downloaded and analyzed the GHCN weather data. That leads us to the next step:  Displaying the data!

Our goal is to display the climate change data so that the regional trends are clearly visible as well as the local weather history underpinning those trends. In order to do this we decided on the following graphics components:

  • displaying data on a map, both in the form of point locations (the weather stations) and bitmap overlays (regional weather trends). The Leaflet library of JavaScript routines handles this part.
  • displaying graphs of the trends in local weather data. The D3.js library handles this.
  • and displaying the data history for a given weather station as a heatmap. We draw directly to
    Continue reading