Analyze Twister Knowledge with Python and GeoPandas | by Lee Vaughan | Jan, 2025


QUICK SUCCESS DATA SCIENCE

Insights from NOAA’s public area database

15 min learn

16 hours in the past

A map of the contiguous United States showing tornado touchdown locations as red dots. State and county boundaries are outlined in blue and light gray, providing geographic context. The red dots are scattered unevenly, with higher concentrations in areas known as Tornado Alley, including parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska.
Reported tornadoes with an assigned EF magnitude from 1950–2023 (by the writer)

Should you’re keen on finding out tornadoes, the Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has a beautiful public-domain database to make your day. Extending again to 1950, it covers twister beginning and ending places, magnitudes, accidents, fatalities, monetary prices, and extra.

The information is accessible by means of NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center. Along with the uncooked information, this website provides many charts and maps that slice and cube the info in a number of methods. One in every of my favourite maps is the 20-year common of extreme climate watches. It makes it appear to be Oklahoma’s borders are largely primarily based on unhealthy climate!

A colorful map of the contiguous United States shows counties colored by annual severe weather watches. The largest number of watches is colored yellow; the minimum number is white to light blue. State and county boundaries are outlined in black and light gray, providing geographic context. The yellow counties are concentrated in Oklahoma and seem to follow its state boundary.
Oklahoma (circled) experiences greater than its share of unhealthy climate (NOAA)

These prefab maps are helpful, however they’ll’t deal with each scenario. There will probably be instances when you could make customized maps, both to reply a selected query or to include exterior information.

On this Fast Success Knowledge Science venture, we’ll use Python, pygris, GeoPandas, Plotly Specific, and a part of NOAA’s in depth database to map twister occurrences, graph their…

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