QUICK SUCCESS DATA SCIENCE
Insights from NOAA’s public domain database
If you’re interested in studying tornadoes, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has a wonderful public-domain database to make your day. Extending back to 1950, it covers tornado starting and ending locations, magnitudes, injuries, fatalities, financial costs, and more.
The data is accessible through NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center. In addition to the raw data, this site supplies many charts and maps that slice and dice the data in multiple ways. One of my favorite maps is the 20-year average of severe weather watches. It makes it look like Oklahoma’s borders are mostly based on bad weather!
These prefab maps are useful, but they can’t address every situation. There will be times when you need to make custom maps, either to answer a specific question or to incorporate outside data.
In this Quick Success Data Science project, we’ll use Python, pygris, GeoPandas, Plotly Express, and part of NOAA’s extensive database to map tornado occurrences, graph their…