The world has been experiencing unprecedented climate change. Representations of the effects of this change can be found all around us. Rising temperatures give way to longer periods of hot and dry weather.
I have chosen to visualize this change in an interactive map. The map shows the location of class G wildfires in the Western US. Class G wildfires are fires that are 5,000 acres or over. Observing only large sized fires fit the scope of this Hypothesis.
The size and color of the map markers are scaled by by threshold values that arrange the acres burned into 10 bins. The bin ranges are determined by my analysis of the number of fires of each size.
The color of the state is determined by the amount of acres burned in that state, ranked relative to the orther states that year. The color scales darker as the amount of acres burned increases.
Information can be seen on the left with the year, total amount of fires, and total amount of acres burned. The table shows a ranked order of acres burned by state.
Primary data sourced from Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity
Fire size class from National Wildfire Coordinating Group
Visualization created with D3 and vanilla JS
Data prep done in python (Jupyter Notebook)