April 9, 2018
Makeover Monday: Arctic Sea Ice is Disappearing Fastest in Summer Months
arctic sea ice
,
change
,
climate change
,
environment
,
global warming
,
line chart
,
Makeover Monday
,
melting
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So when I found this visualization by the National Snow & Ice Data Center, it seemed an appropriate topic for Makeover Monday. One of the most fun elements of this data set is that it includes only two columns: date and sea ice extent.
What works well?
- Without even trying, it tells a compelling story.
- The interactivity is fabulous. I really like being able to simply click on an item on the legend to have it added or removed as a highlighted line.
- Including the 1981-2010 median along with the IQR and IDR provides great context.
- Defaulting the view to show 2012 (the previously worst year for arctic ice) to 2018 helps show how 2018 is looking to surpass 2012 (in a bad way) by a lot.
- Subtitle explains what sea ice extent means
- Good use of simple colors
- Great example of using highlighting for context
What could be improved?
- The x-axis could be simpler by only showing the month names and removing the word "Date" from the axis title.
- Make the title more impactful
My Goals
- First, I wanted to rebuild the original and see if I could make it any better. I couldn't.
- Second, build a spiral diagram that shows the months around the outside, but this only worked well when it was animated.
- Finally, I settled on a different take on the metric that swaps the months and year on the original. That is, put the year on the x-axis and month on each line. This gave me only 12 lines which looked less busy and helped me see patterns for each month.
- Next, I included a line that is the average of each year (black line).
- I then decided to look at how each year of each month changed compared to 1979. I went with a percent change because I think that provides more context.
- Lastly, I included a highlighter for the months and included some BANs of the actual values for comparison.
Click on the image for the interactive version.
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