cambecc / earth

a project to visualize global weather conditions
http://earth.nullschool.net
MIT License
6.15k stars 1.19k forks source link

Overlay Suggestion - Feedback Requested #114

Open adrianturcato opened 4 years ago

adrianturcato commented 4 years ago

Hi,

I have long been a fan of your project. I am an experienced D3.js developer so it has been on my radar for a while.

I was reading this NYT article yesterday about the impact climate change will have on immigration crises: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/climate-migration.html

It is based on a study that looks at how increased temperatures will make certain areas of the world uninhabitable due to high heat and humidity: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/21/11350

This got me thinking, I would love to see an overlay that did not only show temperature or humidity but binned current temperature and humidity conditions into safety levels, in order to show which areas of the world are most affected by dangerous conditions at any point in time.

One option to define safety levels would be to use Heat Index as defined by NOAA and used by OSHA (this is useful in part because it was specifically designed to represent situations where individuals are doing physical labor outdoors): https://www.weather.gov/safety/heat-index

There are lots of other methods available, which are more sophisticated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_comfort

If I implemented this and submitted a pull request, would the team be amenable to including this as a feature?

Thanks!

Adrian