Shadows in the Rain

Overview

Shadows in the Rain is a web application to analyze the regions in the US most likely to be affected by hurricanes. It plots and plays back hurricanes from the 1800s to 2010 in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans on a map, showing the intensity, damage, and their real-time progress.

Introduction to the Platform

The EVL boasts a state-of-the-art multitouch display known as the SAGE2. It has an astounding resolution of 8160 x 2304 pixels and comprises 18 individual displays (in a 6x3 layout). This large screen is built to facilitate collaboration and group-oriented problem-solving. The teams for this course project were expected to present their application on this screen in a full-screen mode, scaled appropriately.

SAGE2 Expertise

We tried to understand how well our audience knew about SAGE2 and its capabilities, as it would be used by our audience to interact with our application. We found that three different types of audiences exist:

1. EVL Researchers and Faculty: These users know the capabilities of SAGE2 and are aware of all the interactions that it supports. They also consisted of people involved in the inception and creation of SAGE2.
2. EVL Students: These users had either taken a course offered by the EVL or know about SAGE2's multitouch capabilities and use it like any other touch device.
3. Novice Users: These users may use the typical keyboard and mouse input methods that the SAGE2 supports, like a general desktop computer.

Our goal was to consider all these user groups and build an interface that would offer a complete and uncompromised experience for all.

Familiarity with hurricane-related terminologies

UIC offers a BS, MS, and Ph.D. in Earth and Environmental Sciences (EES) under the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The courses are designed to train the students in interdisciplinary earth science, laboratory investigations, and computational modeling and simulation of big data. Since we were working on a project that was closely related to EES, we had the opportunity to interview a few students from that discipline.

While our team was getting familiar with all the hurricane-related terminologies in our project, we found that the students from an EES background had no problem understanding them. We saw them as our power users who could understand the application at a conceptual level. They could answer a lot of our questions on the factors and parameters that affected the hurricanes, and how the factors themselves were interdependent.

The Data

The datasets provided to us were a list of hurricanes and their related parameters from both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans (about 100,000 rows of data). As a team, we were tasked with creating a web application to help users analyze historical data.

The Opportunity

Due to climate change and increasing global sea levels, we are witnessing an increase in hurricanes every year and the damage caused. In this project, we analyzed and built a model to show how geographical locations have been increasingly affected in the past years. We can use this data to predict the areas most vulnerable to hurricanes in the future.

How this is currently done:

1. Using commercial software in weather stations and the media.
2. Weather apps like weather.com, Accuweather, etc., provide some historical data on hurricanes, but they lack the controls to slice and dice data.
3. Static maps available on the web sometimes paint an incomplete picture or even show exaggerated data.

After collecting feedback and gaining a better understanding of the problem, we developed a value proposition about the necessity and direction for our app.

Shadows in the Rain is a tool that lets users study the effects of past hurricanes to make better predictions about the extent and areas of damage they could cause in the future.

Our product helps

• Researchers and students who are studying hurricanes.

Who need a better way to

• Analyze past hurricane data to make future predictions.

By

• Letting them slice and dice the data and visualize hurricanes on a map.
• Playing hurricanes on the map according to their original course and the areas they affected.

And is better than

• Using static images issued by the National Weather Service.
• Historical data by weather applications.

Because

• Users can select and compare hurricanes and the extent of damage they caused.
• Use map controls to pan, zoom, and change map layers to analyze affected areas meticulously.
• Filter and classify hurricanes by factors like wind speed and pressure, time of the year, whether they made landfall or not, etc.

Specific Requirements

There were a few course-specific requirements that our application had to fulfill:

1. View and sort hurricanes chronologically, alphabetically, and by maximum wind speed.
2. Ability to pick a particular hurricane, or a hurricane season and play it on the map with controls to pause and resume playback as if in real-time, and allow the user to change the rate at which time passes.
3. While playing the hurricane, it should show the wind speed, pressure, and the damage caused overlaid on the hurricane itself. The timeline of the hurricane through its various stages should be shown to the user (tropical depression, cyclone categories, and hurricane). The user should be able to pan, zoom, and reset the view of the map.
4. To emphasize the effects of climate change, the app must provide overview graphs showing the number of hurricanes per year from 2005 to the present.
5. Provide a heatmap of which areas are most likely to be affected by hurricanes based on the overall data.

Key Findings

1. The radii of damage caused by the hurricanes at each position is as large as an enitre city.
2. Most hurricanes never make landfall.
3. Many hurricanes start as a tropical depression and continue to gain intensity. Towards the end, the lose their intensity and end again as a tropical depression.
4. The extent of 34knot wind speed radii is more than the extent of 64 knots wind speed radii. This was observed when the quadrophinic data was plotted onto the map.
5. It is generally possible to predict the route a hurricane might take, but the outliers often cause catastrophic damage to life and property.

Future Scope

After testing our application with the users and upon viewing the projects that were presented by other teams in class, we had a lot of take aways. Here are some items that would be our priority in the future and would enrich the features that we already have:

1. Show the current wind speed and compare it with the max wind speed of a particular hurricane at each point.
2. Represent the wind speed (currently in knots) in other units that are user friendly (like kms and miles per hour).
3. Show if the hurricane was in Atlantic or Pacific (in the info box below).
4. Allow the user to jump to a particular hurricane in the hurricane list box by providing a search box on the top. This search box should accept hurricane names, years and so on.
5. The hurricane seasons (currently mentioned as only Atlantic or Pacific seasons) must also show the months when they are active.