For part of my master's thesis, I would like to create a visualize the beginning of fire season over the past 50 years.
Fire season has started sooner each year and has gone on longer, says Tony Westerling, a climate change and wildfire expert at UC Merced. The trend correlates with years of warm springs and early snow melts, Westerling says.
Cal Fire records data on fire incidents and fire season for the past 13 years. Westerling is also in the process of compiling data on related climate factors, such as temperature an snow melt.
Nuts and bolts
The fire season for a given year would be represented by horizontal bars. Additional layers could be toggled on and off to show the year's snow melt and average temperature.
Alternatively, I'd use the bars to represent fire seasons and use bubbles to mark a wildfire and its relative size.
Skills needed would include data scraping from the Cal Fire website. Also, feedback on a design concept.
Sources
Links
Southern California Public radio has built this fire tracking app using similar data.
Publication
I will be using this visualization in my master's thesis, which will either be pitched to a science publication or self-published cringe.
I can see the L.A. Times or KQED/NPR being interested in this visualization.
Questions