Tag Archives: data visualisation

HeatTraKR – A Knime workflow for exploring Australian climate data

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Recently, I decided to crunch some data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (which I’ll just call BoM) to assess some of my own perceptions about how the climate in my home city of Brisbane had changed throughout my lifetime. As always, I performed the analysis in Knime, a free and open software platform that allows you to do highly sophisticated and repeatable data analyses without having to learn how to code. Along the way, I also took the opportunity to sharpen my skills at using R as a platform for making data visualisations, which is something that Knime doesn’t do quite as well.

The result of this process is HeatTraKR, a Knime workflow for analysing and visualising climate data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, principally the Australian Climate Observations Reference Network – Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT) dataset, which has been developed specifically to monitor climate variability and change in Australia. The workflow uses Knime’s native functionality to download, prepare and manipulate the data, but calls upon R to create the visual outputs. (The workflow does allow you to create the plots with Knime’s native nodes, but they are not as nice as the R versions.)

I’ve already used the HeatTraKR to produce this post about how the climate in Brisbane and Melbourne (my new home city) is changing. But the workflow has some capabilities that are not showcased in that post, and I will take the opportunity to demonstrate these a little later in the present post.

Below I explain how to install and use the HeatTraKR, and take a closer look at some of its  outputs that I have not already discussed in my other post. Continue reading →

Confessions of a climate deserter

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For so long, climate change has been discussed in Australia (and indeed elsewhere) as if it were an abstract concept, a threat that looms somewhere in the future. Not anymore. In 2019, climate change became a living nightmare from which Australia may never awake.

While I prepared this post in the dying weeks of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, there was not a day when some part of the country was not on fire. As at 24 January, more than 7.7 million hectares — that’s an area about the size of the Czech Republic — have burned. Thirty-three people have died. Towns have been destroyed. Old-growth forests have burned. Around a billion animals have been killed. Whole species have probably been lost.

The effects were not only felt in the bush. Capital cities such as Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra endured scorching temperatures while choking in smoke. Newspaper front pages (except those of the Murdoch press) became a constant variation on the theme of red. The country entered a state of collective trauma, as if at war with an unseen and invincible enemy.

The connection between the bushfires and climate change has been accepted by nearly everyone, with the notable exception of certain denialists who happen to be running the country–and even they are starting to change their tune (albeit to one of ‘adaptation and resilience’). One thing that is undeniable is that 2019 was both the hottest and driest year Australia has experienced since records began, and by no small margin. In December, the record for the country’s hottest day was smashed twice in a single week. And this year was not an aberration. Eight of the ten hottest years on record occurred in the last 10 years.  Environmentally, politically, and culturally, the country is in uncharted territory.

Climate deserters

I watched this nightmare unfold from my newly adopted city of Melbourne, to which which I moved from Brisbane with my then-fiancée-now-wife in January 2019. As far as I can tell, Melbourne has been one of the better places in the country to have been in the past few months. The summer here has been pleasantly mild so far, save for a few horrific days when northerly winds baked the city and flames lapped at the northern suburbs. It seems that relief from the heat is never far away in Melbourne: the cool change always comes, tonight or tomorrow if not this afternoon. During the final week of 2019, as other parts of Victoria remained an inferno, Melbourne reverted to temperatures in the low 20s. We even got some rain. It was almost embarrassing.

Finding relief from the heat is one of the reasons my wife and I moved to Melbourne. Having lived in Brisbane all of our lives, we were used to its subtropical summers, but the last few pushed us over the edge. To be sure, Brisbane rarely sees extreme heat. In summer, the maximums hover around 30 degrees, and rarely get beyond the mid-30s. But as Brisbanites are fond of saying (especially to southerners ), it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity that gets you. The temperature doesn’t have to be much about 30 degrees in Brisbane before comfort levels become thoroughly unreasonable. Continue reading →

A thesis relived: using text analytics to map a PhD journey

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Your thesis has been deposited.

Is this how four years of toil was supposed to end? Not with a bang, but with a weird sentence from my university’s electronic submission system? In any case, this confirmation message gave me a chuckle and taught me one new thing that could be done to a thesis. A PhD is full of surprises, right till the end.

But to speak of the end could be premature, because more than two months after submission, one thing that my thesis hasn’t been yet is examined. Or if it has been, the examination reports are yet to be deposited back into the collective consciousness of my grad school.

The lack of any news about my thesis is hardly keeping me up at night, but it does make what I am about to do in this post a little awkward. Following Socrates, some people would argue that an unexamined thesis is not worth reliving. At the very least, Socrates might have cautioned against saying too much about a PhD experience that might not yet be over. Well, too bad: I’m throwing that caution to the wind, because what follows is a detailed retrospective of my PhD candidature.

Before anyone starts salivating at the prospect of reading sordid details about about existential crises, cruel supervisors or laboratory disasters, let me be clear that what follows is not a psychodrama or a cautionary tale. Rather, I plan to retrace the scholastic journey that I took through my PhD candidature, primarily by examining what I read, and when.

I know, I know: that sounds really boring. But bear with me, because this post is anything but a literature review. This is a data-driven, animated-GIF-laden, deep-dive into the PhD Experience. Continue reading →

Tracking and comparing regional coverage of coal seam gas

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In the last post, I started looking at how the level of coverage of specific regions changed over time — an intersection of the Where and When dimensions of the public discourse on coal seam gas. In this post I’ll continue along this line of analysis while also incorporating something from the Who dimension. Specifically, I’ll compare how news and community groups cover specific regions over time.

Regional coverage by news organisations

One of the graphs in my last post compared the ratio of coverage of locations in Queensland to that of locations in New South Wales. Figure 1 below takes this a step further, breaking down the data by region as well. What this graph shows is the level of attention given to each region by the news sources in my database (filtered to ensure complete coverage for the period — see the last post) over time. In this case, I have calculated the “level of attention” for a given region by counting the number of times a location within that region appears in the news coverage, and then aggregating these counts within a moving 90-day window. Stacking the tallies to fill a fixed height, as I have done in Figure 1, reveals the relative importance of each region, regardless of how much news is generated overall (to see how the overall volume of coverage changes over time, see the previous post). The geographic boundaries that I am using are (with a few minor changes) the SA4 level boundaries defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. You can see these boundaries by poking around on this page of the ABS website.

The regions in Figure 1 are shaded so that you can see the division at the state level. The darker band of blue across the lower half of the graph corresponds with regions in Queensland. The large lighter band above that corresponds with regions in New South Wales. Above that, you can see smaller bands representing Victoria and Western Australia. (The remaining states are there too, but they have received so little coverage that I haven’t bothered to label them.) I have added labels for as many regions as I can without cluttering up the chart.

Figure 1. Coverage of geographic regions in news stories about coal seam gas, measured by the number of times locations from each region are mentioned in news stories within a moving 90-day window. The blue shadings group the regions by state. Hovering over the image shows a colour scheme suited to identifying individual regions. You can see larger versions of these images by clicking here and here.

Continue reading →