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U.S. air quality and where not to vacation #257

Open vpenney opened 6 years ago

vpenney commented 6 years ago

Pitch

Summary

I found historic air quality measures for cities across the United States and want to see if there are any times of year when air quality seems particularly poor in certain areas. I also want to see if there are any recent trends--maybe all the smog trapped in Salt Lake City just gets worse every year and it's doomed to have poor air quality unto the ends of time.

Details

Possible headline(s): Top U.S. vacation destinations to avoid this summer

Data set(s): Data lives here

Code repository: Code lives here

Possible problems/fears/questions: This data is divided into a lot of different sections and I need to figure out what it all means since the documentation is fairly vague. There are particle counts, percentages, and then a whole section of micrograms per cubic meter, which appears to be the most valuable section.

Work so far

I've played with the data a little and made a fun-looking but in reality, useless, scatterplot of historic air quality data in Utah.

screen shot 2018-08-06 at 8 17 34 pm

Checklist

This checklist must be completed before you submit your draft.

sarahslo commented 6 years ago

sounds like you are asking the right questions at this stage! the scatterplot could be fever lines. could those places you have been organized somehow? be north/south/east/west of perhaps by valley/mountain or urban/rural/suburban...?

that would add more meaning once you have the definitions.

your headline makes me want to read, btw!

vpenney commented 6 years ago

Update

I did find some kind of trend in all of this data.

Big cities, like NY and L.A. seem to have increasingly better air quality:

los-angeles

new-york

Whereas ski resorts are a bit more of a mixed bag:

vail-beaver-creek

jackson-hole

The overall particle counts are still much lower for ski resorts, but I wonder how much public transportation/ air quality initiatives are helping air quality in big cities, vs. increasing population and more people driving out to resorts in the more mountainy/ wildernessy areas.

Any changes in direction or topic?

I'm heading toward more of a comparison between cities vs. resort areas at this point, instead of a big-picture view of air quality in all popular U.S. vacation destinations.

Problems/Questions

Not really a problem, but I'm still thinking through the best way to visualize my data--I may overlay all of the cities and all of the resorts, then do line graphs or histograms to show trends. I may not.

Checklist

mattrehbein commented 6 years ago

The scatterplots look really nice -- the trend is really clear and easy to grasp right away. It even looks like the resort levels are trending down overall, though in a less line-y fashion.

I'd like to see/know what authorities say is an acceptable level of air quality to put the y axis in context, but maybe you're already planning on providing that in text surrounding the graphics.

If the levels for both cities and resorts are trending generally down -- and maybe they're not; maybe it's just my inexpert reading of what you have above -- to me the most interesting thing is why. I'm sure that will be hard to get at given our limited timeframe, but as you said, maybe there are clean air initiatives that were put in place shortly after 2000?

sarahslo commented 6 years ago

they all trend down, but they look the same because you have them on different scales. make each city a different color, and put them on one scale. the story will be different. it's back to you original idea but with more focused data, so that's excellent.

kevinlitman-navarro commented 6 years ago
vpenney commented 6 years ago

Final

Project visuals/text

Rocky Mountain National Park rm-air-quality

Grand Canyon National park grc-air-quality

Great Smoky Mountains grs-air-quality

National Park Annual Averages - Air Quality natl-parks-air-quality

Details

As the population of the United States at large sweats through another record-hot summer, vacationers flock to destinations outside of the of the cement heat traps of the cities.

Late spring, summer and fall are the most popular months at the United States' National Parks, but these months are some of the worst times to visit the parks if the goal is to escape the smog of the cities. The National Parks furthest from urban centers--the ones that people visit to "breathe in some fresh air," experience the most noticable decline in air quality during popular visiting months.

Headline: Actual "fresh air" is scant during summer National Park visits

Published website version: https://vpenney.github.io/national-parks/

Code repository: https://github.com/vpenney/data-studio/tree/master/code/05-air-quality

Final data set(s): https://github.com/vpenney/data-studio/tree/master/code/05-air-quality

What did you find to be the most difficult part of this project?

Trying to visualize seasonality across multiple years was difficult. I would like to ultimately break the individual national park bar charts into spring, summer, winter, and fall bar charts so it's easier to see how they compare.

I'd also like to add a map with locations of all of the national parks.

Are you satisfied with what you produced? Is there anything you would like to change or improve?

I'm fairly satisfied, but would like to go a bit further and possibly look at wildfire season in California and which months are historically the worst for air quality/ visits to those parks.

Checklist