Weekly Viz 2018-04-09

Arctic Sea Ice Extent

About Makeover Monday

MakeoverMonday is a social data project: “Each week we post a link to a chart, and its data, and then you rework the chart. Maybe you retell the story more effectively, or find a new story in the data. We’re curious to see the different approaches you all take. Whether it’s a simple bar chart or an elaborate infographic, we encourage everyone of all skills to partake. Together we can have broader conversations about and with data.”

Starting from Jan 08, 2018, I decided to put aside one hour on Monday weekly to create some visualization and find some insights from the data.

The datasets are published each week at: MakeoverMonday Datasets.

Makeover Monday 0409

This week’s dateset is about the Arctic Sea Ice Extent evolution over time. Climate change has raised a lot of concern nowadays, but this is the first time that I have actually worked on a climate change related time series data. The original dashboard is a really good example of visualing time series data with only one feature - it even allows you to select each year on the right to make the curve visible. You can play with it here.

My Visualization

When I look at the dataset, I have two questions in mind: firstly, is the Arctic Sea Ice Extent really melting dramatically as said? Secondly, how is the seasonality change of the Extent? Therefore, I visualized the data with two dimensions: yearly and monthly.

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Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.

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Insights

• From the above chart (yearly chart), you can obviously see that the median Ice Extent is decreasing over year. Both the maximum Extent and minimum Extent has been decreasing as well. From the below chart (monthly chart), you can see that all the lines with deeper colors, i.e., the lines that represent recent years, are lower than average, indicating again, the Ice Extent is shrinking.
• The minimum Ice Extent was always seen in September. Also, in September, we can see the largest year-over-year differences.

Follow this link to find more weekly vizzes :)