Introduction

Across the whole nation and the globe, we face common issues of Global warming and sea-level rise. Global warming is a phenomenon in which the average temperature of Earth’s climate system is increasing, which causes climate change. Human activities have been one of the most influencing factors of global warming since the mid-20th century (IPCC). The largest impact of human activity is the emission of greenhouse gas such as carbon dioxide, which is released through deforestation and burning fossil fuels. There are some negative impacts of global warming. Ocean temperature increasing causes ice sheet melting and sea-level rise.  The goal of this project is to visualize global warming relating to temperature changes, Carbon emissions, and ice sheet melting.

Survey

There were a total of nine responses collected by Google Survey. Five out of nine participants are in the age group of 18-25 years old, while the other four participants are that of  26-35 years old (See Fig. 1). The result reflects that all participants have realized environmental issues and believe it can be improved, but the extent of efforts that should be made to improve is different. 44.4 percent of the UXPA participants think our environment is in some trouble but can be saved with little effort while 55.6 percent of them believe that the environment is in bad shape but a lot of effort might save it (See Fig. 2).

Fig. 1 What is your age group?

Fig. 2. Responses to the Sentence Completion “Our Environment is”

Among the listed environmental issues, ozone depletion, toxic waste, global warming, water pollution, air pollution and deforestation, 66.7 percent of UXPA participants, six people, thought global warming is the worst environmental problem facing the planet, one participant believed that it is water pollution, one participant thought that it is toxic waste and one participant claimed it is all of the above problems (See Fig. 3). The conclusion is that global warming raises more concern than other environmental.

Fig. 3. Which of the following do you feel is the worst environmental problem facing the planet?

Datasets

The datasets are: 

1.  Global Land and Ocean Temperature Anomalies from NASA

2. Global Carbon Budget 2019 from ICOS

3. Sea Ice and Snow Cover Extent from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)

Tools

Microsoft Excel and Google OpenRefine were used to clean and refine the datasets. The datasets were then used in Tableau Public, a free, cloud-based application for filtering, analyzing, and visualizing data, to develop visualizations and analyze the datasets further.

Fig.5. Tableau

Data Preparation

After the datasets were downloaded, they were opened in Microsoft Excel, the metadata on the top of datasets were deleted, and only the data that would be analyzed were kept. The National Carbon Emissions file listed the countries in different columns. In order to bring those countries’ data in Tableau as one variable – Countries, OpenRefine was used to transfer columns into rows, rename the transferred column as Countries, and remove null data (Fig.5). 

Fig.5. OpenRefine

Visualizations and Analysis

Visualization 1:  Global Land and Ocean Temperature Anomalies 

Global temperature has increased compared to the average temperature of the 1901-2000 based period (Fig.6). 

Fig.6  Global temperature changes by year

Visualization 2: National Carbon Emissions   

Certain countries, such as China, India, the USA, and Russia are more responsible for carbon emissions than other countries (Fig.7).

Fig.7. National carbon emissions

Visualization 3: National Carbon Emissions

Fig.8. Co2 Emissions

Visualization 4: Global Carbon budget

The budget imbalance is the sum of emissions (fossil fuel and industry + land-use change) minus (atmospheric growth + ocean sink + land sink); it is a measure of our imperfect data and understanding of the contemporary carbon cycle (Fig 9). 

Fig.9. Global carbon production and absorption

Visualization 5: Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Extent 

Fig.10. Ice sheet melting

Final Poster

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User Testing

Task: Explore the dashboard and answer following questions.

1. What do you learn about global warming that you didn’t know before?
2. What is confusing for you?  
3. How would you improve information visualization? 
4. What’s kind of feelings do you have when do you look at this visualization?

Participant Answers

1. What did you learn about global warming that you didn’t know before? I didn’t know that the biggest global land and sea temperature anomalies took place in 2016. 
2. What is confusing for you? The budget imbalancing section is a little confusing since I’m not too familiar with this set of data so I’m not quite sure how to interpret the chart. 
3. How would you improve information visualization? I would add filters so I can drill down on certain regions/countries. 
4. What kind of feeling do you have when you look at this visualization? I feel a sense of urgency that we need to take action to slow down the trend and eventually reversing it so that our next generation doesn’t have to face severe weather and subsequent problems. 

Reflection

Visualizing the relationship between Carbon dioxide emission, temperature changes, and ice sheets melting is an exciting process. There are some difficulties during the process, and it takes time to clean organize different datasets before bringing them into Tableau. Managing dashboards is also a challenging task in managing various figures and diagrams to show hierarchy in one page. If doing this visualization for another time, I would add more explanation for the diagram, such as the carbon budget imbalance.