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Researchers In Athens is working to predict forest fires – a thing notoriously difficult to do – at the Penteli Observatory. But last summer, the installation was swallowed up in the flames while a forest fire arrived at its doors much faster and closer than even the meteorologists who worked there.
It was mainly the absence of strong winds that avoided Athens wider of more widespread and devastating damage. Cities of a situation similar to Athens – urban areas which are very vulnerable to global warming disasters, but which have not yet experienced major disasters – are described by climatologists as “seated ducks”.
The list of cities includes Dallas, New York, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Sydney and Cape Town, where the risk could come from forest fires or sudden floods. Or – in the worst case – both.
How did we do
To make the interactive globe, I first had to geolore all the cities highlighted as being in danger. It is a fairly painless exercise, with the help of the excellent Awesome Geocode plugin Available in Google Sheets.
Simply add the list of locations to a new spreadsheet, run the geocoding The script and, hey presto, the values of latitude and longitude appear in columns next to them.
The next step is to assign a type of marker to each city according to the nature of the climate risk, they are vulnerable to suffering. I designed these icons in Adobe Illustrator and the AI recorded in the form of SVG (evolutionary vector graphics). The advantage of having the icons in SVG format as opposed to JPG or PNG is that they remain clear because they are vector images and not raster.
(NED NOTE: We have written on the differences between vector images and raster in a previous newsletter, if you have missed it, send us an email as climate@ft.com and we will send it to you.)
The cities and coordinates calculation sheet is then imported into our custom flouri card model, which reads this data and places the icons and labels on a map. I chose a globe rather than a standard card projection because I find that they are more engaging, especially on a mobile phone.
For the Dallas flood risk map, we have received data at Census by Guidewire Hazardhub. The GIS file (graphic information system) was greater than 15 MB, which is too important to load in the development and cause rendering problems when you try to load it on a mobile phone.
To reduce the size of the file, I used Mapshaper.org – A free website that allows you to download GIS data, simplify it and download it again. These simplified data were then loaded in the development, one of the many data visualization tools that we use at the FT. I then styled the data with a yellow / green / blue color ramp which was intuitive for flood data.
Until now, the so-called cities of sitting Ducks have been “lucky” to avoid the combination of conditions that will lead to the next disaster, explains Erin Coughlan de Perez, professor at TUFTS University, an expert in climate risk.
But the chances are against them after The year to April has shown relentless global warmingThe temperature increased over the 12 months of previous monitoring to 1.58 ° C above pre-industrial levels.
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