Click link to video on YouTube.
For my data visualization project, I was interested in exploring data revolving around average temperatures, precipitation, and wildfire in order to better understand how these three things work together in climate change in the state of California. For this, I utilized the cal-adapt website to acquire the data from 1950 to present day and even the predicted data from present day to 2100. What I discovered is that the average annual temperatures went up and acres burned also increased, demonstrating how global climate change is affecting the landscape of California and will continue to affect it if we do not change our interactions with the environment. To represent this data in a visualization, I created a video that utilized the statistics for the average temperature and wildfire acres burned to understand how they correlate together. I created the metaphor that “climate change is a cake in the oven” to represent how climate change is affecting the “oven” temperature as it continually rises and eventually will burn our “cake.” I utilized colors in order to represent the temperature and wildfire increase in the span of time. With this, I hope to represent climate change in a way that is easy to understand, but also ironic in its presentation to make the audience think about climate change in a bittersweet context while also presenting it in an engaging way. Sources: https://cal-adapt.org/tools/annual-averages/ https://www.fire.ca.gov/stats-events/ Music: "Spring in my Step" Royalty Free