# Posts for Tag: geography

### Tracking US Coronavirus Cases by State

Posted In: Maps

The coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) is literally affecting the entire globe right now and changing the way we live our lives here in the US and all over the world.

There are quite a number of different coronavirus-related dataviz out there, but as we shelter-in-place I wanted to add a map that looked at a number of different metrics that tell us about the coronavirus pandemic by US states and look at those metrics on a population basis.

There are a number of data sources that I’ve found that publish data about the coronavirus and the resulting disease (Covid-19) in the United States:

This map is based on the data compiled from covidtracking.com, partly because it has a good API and also lists testing, cases and deaths. The data I’ve included on the map is:

• Numbers of coronavirus cases – i.e. tested positive for virus
• Numbers of coronavirus tests administered
• Numbers of deaths due to coronavirus

Each of these is also calculated per 100,000 population in the state:

• Numbers of coronavirus cases per 100k people- i.e. tested positive for virus
• Numbers of coronavirus tests administered per 100k people
• Numbers of deaths due to coronavirus per 100k people

These latter metrics are important because numbers of cases or deaths can be obscured by small or large populations but per capita data (or per 100k capita data) can point out interesting outliers.

It is important to note that the data is far from perfect. There is probably significant underreporting of tests, cases and deaths. The data is a collection for the various local and state agencies that are working hard to deal with the medical, social and political ramifications of the pandemic, while also collecting data. We don’t know how many Americans have coronavirus because of lack of testing.

Also important is that the number of positive cases is a function of how much testing is taking place so cases does not necessarily represent the exact prevalence of the virus, though there will probably be good correlation between cases and actual coronavirus infections. Luckily it sounds like tests are becoming more widely available so hopefully those numbers will go up sharply.

For more information about the virus and the disease and data collection, you can find good information on the CDC website.

Sources and Tools:

Coronavirus cases are obtained from covidtracking.com. And the visualization was created using javascript and the open source leaflet javascript mapping library.

### US County Electoral Map – Land Area vs Population

Posted In: Maps | Uncategorized | Voting

#### County-level Election Results from 2016

This interactive map shows the election results by county and you can display the size of counties based on their land area or population size.

A little while ago, I made a map (cartogram) that showed the state by state electoral results from the 2016 Presidential Election by scaling the size of the states based on their electoral votes. The idea for that map was that by portraying a state as Red or Blue, your eye naturally attempts to determine which color has a greater share of the total. On a normal election map of the 2016 Election, Red states dominate, especially because a number of larger, less populated states happen to vote Republican. That cartogram changed the size of the states so that large states with low population, and thus low electoral votes tended to shrink in size, while smaller states with moderate to larger populations tended to grow in size. Thus, when your eyes attempt to discern which color prevails, the comparison is more accurate and attempts to replicate the relative ratio of electoral votes for each side.

This map looks at the election results, county by county. An interesting thing to note is that this view is even more heavily dominated by the color red, for the same reasons. Less densely populated counties tend to vote republican, while higher density, typically smaller counties tend to vote for democrats. As a result, the blue counties tend to be the smaller ones so blue is visually less represented than it should be based on vote totals. More than 75% of the land area is red, when looking at the map based on land areas, while shifting to the population view only about 46% of the map is red. Neither of these percentages is exactly correct because each county is colored fully red or blue and don’t take into account that some counties are won by a large percentage and some are essentially tied. However, the population number is certainly closer to reality as Trump won about 48.8% of the votes that went to either Trump or Clinton.

#### Instructions

This tool should be relatively straightforward to use. Just click around and play with it.
The map has a few different options for display:

• Hide Circles – just shows the county map
• Show land circles – where the area of the circle matches the area of the county itself, though obviously shaped like a circle. The counties are colored red or blue depending on whether Trump or Clinton won more votes in that county.
• Show population circles – where the area of the circle matches the relative population of the county itself. More populated counties will grow larger while less populated counties will shrink. The counties are colored red or blue depending on whether Trump or Clinton won more votes in that county.
• Selecting the No County Overlap checkbox will spread out all of the circles so you can see them all. The total displayed area of the county circles is the same in either land and population view, though if the circles are overlapping, you may see less total colors.

#### Visualization notes

This was my second attempt at using d3 to generate visualizations. I typically use leaflet to do web-based mapping but I wanted the power of d3 which has functions for the circles to prevent overlapping. This map was inspired by Karim Douieb’s cool visualization of 2016 election results. I modified it in a number of different ways to try to make it more interactive and useful.

This visualization does not actually simulate the collisions between the circles on your browser. It is a bit computationally taxing and causes my computer fan to turn on after awhile. So instead I ran the simulation on my computer and recorded the coordinates for where each circle ended up for each category. Then your browser is simply using d3 transitions to shift positions and sizes of the circles between each of the maps, which is simpler, though with 3142 counties, it can still tax the computer occasionally.

Data and Tools
County level election data is from MIT Election Lab. Population data used is for 2018. The visualization was created using d3 javascript visualization library.

### Where on Earth is all the water? From the solar system to living things

Posted In: Science | Water

Earth is known as the blue planet, because it’s covered with quite a bit of water. But do you know where all that water on Earth is located? This interactive visualization will show the various amounts of water in its many forms on Earth: Oceans, Lakes, Rivers, Ice, Groundwater, etc….

If you hover over a part of the circular, sunburst graph, it will show you the amount of water that is in each of the various forms shown. If the label for that form is bolded, you can click on it and see further subdivisions beyond that broad category. For example, if you click on Oceans, it will show you how the water in the oceans is distributed among the five main oceans on Earth. As you move towards more focused views on the graph, you can click on the center of the circle to move back out to larger categories and see the big picture again.

As you can see, most of the water on Earth is found in a salty form, and most of that is in the oceans. It can be hard to click through to see freshwater lakes and rivers, as you have to be very precise to expand the “Surface Water” wedge, when you are looking at all “Freshwater”.

Even smaller, on that same visualization, is the “Living things” wedge is basically invisible. You can further explore the details of the living things category by clicking on the button that appears on the freshwater graph.

Checking the Group Rivers and Lakes checkbox will group rivers by continent and lakes by major groups.

It is interesting to see how much water there is on Earth (about 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of water), but how little of it is non-salty, liquid freshwater at the surface (about 100,000 cubic kilometers, though that is still quite a lot) but it only makes up about 0.008% of all water on Earth. That means for every 10,000 gallons of water on Earth, only one of those gallons is freshwater in a lake or river that we can easily access.

It is also believed that there is more water deep in the Earth’s interior (i.e. the mantle) than on the surface or near-subsurface, but estimates of that are highly uncertain and are not included in this graph.

If you click out past Earth’s water to look at water in the solar system, the estimates shown in this visualization are only including liquid water and do not include estimates of ice (which I haven’t been able to find estimates of). The amount of water in living things is estimated assuming that the ratio of organic carbon to liquid water is more or less the same across all different types of living things (i.e. viruses, bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, etc.). This isn’t a great assumption but the estimates, which come from estimates of the dry carbon weight of these organisms, vary across many orders of magnitude so being off in liquid water weight/volume by a factor of two or so isn’t a huge problem.

Tools and Data Sources
The sunburst chart is made using the open source, javascript Plot.ly graphing library. Data on water distributions is primarily from Wikipedia – Distribution of WaterList of Rivers by DischargeList of Lakes Weight of Living BiomassExtra-terrestrial water estimates

### Greenhouse gas emissions from airplane flights

Posted In: Environment | Transportation

#### Traveling by airplane produces significant greenhouse gas emissions

Flying in an airplane is likely the most greenhouse gas intensive activity you can do.  In a few short hours, you can can travel thousands of miles across the country or ocean.  It takes a large amount of fossil-fuel energy (oil) to lift an 80+ ton airplane off the ground and propel it at 600 miles per hour through the air.  Every hour of travel (in a Boeing 737) consumes around 750 gallons of jet fuel.

Even when dividing the fuel usage across all of the passengers (and cargo) of an aircraft, airplane travel consumes a significant amount of fuel per passenger.  The fuel economy is estimated to be about the same as a fairly efficient hybrid car driven by one person (60-70 passenger miles per gallon).  However, because you can go 10 times faster and much further more easily than you would in a car, airline travel can, on an absolute basis, emit larger amounts of greenhouse gases. In fact, an individual passenger’s share of emissions from a single airplane flight can exceed the annual average greenhouse gas emissions per capita from a number of countries (and the global average).

The following flight calculator and data visualization shows the miles and emissions produced per passenger by a airplane trip that you can specify.  Choose two airports that you are interested in and click the “Calculate Flight Emissions” button to see the emissions associated with a round-trip flight between these two cities.  The map will show you the flight route and also shows you the countries in the world where this one single round-trip flight produces more emissions per passenger than the average resident does in one year from all sources (annual per capita emissions).

In addition to individual countries, the tool also compares the flight’s per passenger emissions to the global average emissions per capita in 2017 (4.91 tonnes) and the emissions required to achieve a 22℃ climate stabilization in 2030 (3.08 tonnes) and in 2050 (1.37 tonnes). These 2030 and 2050 numbers are based on an International Energy Agency scenario.

#### Calculations of Airplane Emissions

The emissions calculated by this calculator are based on calculations from myclimate.org, a non-profit environmental organization.
The fuel consumption of a jet depends on the size of the aircraft and distance traveled, but takeoff and climbing to cruising altitude are particularly fuel-intensive. On shorter flights, the takeoff and initial climb will constitute a greater proportion of the total flight time so fuel consumption per mile will be higher than on longer (e.g. international) flights.

The detailed methodology is described in more detail in this document.

In addition to emissions of CO2 from the burning of jet fuel, jets also emit other gases (including methane, NOx, and water vapor) which can also contribute to warming (also known as “radiative forcing”). Because the emissions are occurring at high altitude, these gases can have different impacts than those at lower altitude. A number of studies have estimated the impact of these other gases can significantly contribute to the overall radiative forcing and have somewhere between 1.5 and 3 times the impact that the CO2 alone would. A number of studies, including the myclimate calculator use a factor of 2 to account for these non-CO2 gases and their warming impact, and that is what is used in this calculator as well.

Unlike cars, trucks and trains, it is much harder to power airplanes with batteries and electricity and producing low-carbon jet fuels from biomass is proving very challenging.

In order to achieve climate stabilization at 2 degrees C, global emissions need to basically go to zero over the next 40 years. With a growing global population, this means that the allowable emissions per person will shrink rapidly over these coming decades.

Ultimately, while aviation is a small part of global greenhouse gas emissions, it is a larger part of emissions in richer countries (i.e. if you are reading/viewing this post). And there are many in these richer countries who fly a disproportionate amount and therefore contribute a disproportionate amount of emissions. Hopefully, putting airplane travel in this context can help us better understand the impact of our actions and choices and maybe even change behavior for some.

Tools and Data Sources
The calculator estimates flight emissions based on the myclimate carbon footprint calculator. Data for CO2 emissions by country was downloaded from the European Commissions’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research. The map was built using the leaflet open-source mapping library in javascript.

### Assembling the USA state-by-state with state-level statistics

Posted In: Maps

#### Watch the United States assemble state by state based on statistics of interest

Based on earlier popularity of the country-by-country animation, this map lets you watch as the world is built-up one state at a time. This can be done along a large range of statistical dimensions:

• Name (alphabetical)
• abbreviation
• Date of entry to the United States
• State Population (2018)
• Population per Electoral Vote (2018)
• Population per House Seat (2018)
• Land Area (square miles)
• Population Density (ppl per sq mi) (2018)
• State’s Highest Point
• Highest Elevation (ft)
• Mean Elevation (ft)
• State’s Lowest Point
• Lowest Point (ft)
• Life Expectancy at Birth (yrs)
• Median Age (yrs)
• Percent with High School Education
• Percent with Bachelor’s Degree
• Residential Electricity Price (cents per kWh) (2018)
• Gasoline Price ($/gal) Regular unleaded (2019) • State Gross Domestic Product GDP ($Million) (2018)