Instruction

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Overview

Climate change and science has been an issue for discussion and debate for at least the last decade. Climate data collection is currently being collected for areas all over the world. Policy decisions are based on the most recent analysis conducted on data extracted from huge online repositories of this data. Due to the inherent growth in the electronic production and storage of information, there is often a feeling of “information overload” or inundation when facing the process of quantitative decision making. As an analyst your job will often be to explore large data sets and develop questions or ideas from visualizations of those data sets.

The ability to synthesize large data sets using visualizations is a skill that all data scientists should have. In addition to this data scientists are called upon to present data syntheses and develop questions or ideas based on their data exploration. This lab should take you through the major steps in data exploration and presentation.

Objective

The objective of this laboratory is to survey the available data, plan, design, and create an information dashboard/presentation that not only explores the data but helps you develop questions based on that data exploration. To accomplish this task you will have to complete a number of steps:

1. Identify what information interests you about climate change.

2. Find, collect, organize, and summarize the data necessary to create your data exploration plan.

3. Design and create the most appropriate visualizations (no less than 5 visualizations) to explore the data and present that information.

4. Finally organize the layout of those visualizations into a dashboard (use the flexdashboard package) in a way that shows your path of data exploration.

5. Develop four questions or ideas about climate change from your visualizations.

Dates & Deliverables

The due date for this project is XX at the start of class. This assignment is worth 75 points, 3x a normal homework, the additional time should allow you to spend the neccessary effort on this assignment.

You are welcome to work in groups of ≤2 people. However, each person in a group must submit their own link to the assignment on moodle for grading! Each team member can submit the same link to a single rpubs account, however it may be a good idea for each of you to post your own copy to rpubs in case you want to share it to prospective employers ect.

Methods Help

Getting data

There are lots of places we can get climate data to answer your questions. The simplest would be to go to NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/). There are all kinds of data here (regional, global, marine). Also, on the front page of the NOAA website there are also other websites that have climate data, such as: (https://www.climate.gov/), (https://www.weather.gov/), (https://www.drought.gov/drought/), and (https://www.globalchange.gov/). Obviously, you don’t have to use all of them but it might be helpful to browse them to get ideas for the development of your questions.

Alternatively, and more professionally, there are tons of packages that allow you to access data from R. See here for a great primer on accessing NOAA data with ‘R’. It is also a good introduction to API keys and their use.

Analysis

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Global Temperature Change

CO2 emissions by source

Global CO2 atmospheric concentration

Sea level change

Summary and Questions

#Q1.As the average global temperature on the earth rises, what are the results?

As the average global temperature on earth rises, caused by greenhouse effects, the sea ice has been melting away and sea-level rise too.

#Q2. Describe CO2, and also describe the key factors which are the sources that cause CO2?

CO2 is a kind of greenhouse gas that absorbs and emits infrared radiation in the wavelength range emitted by Earth. As CO2 on earth has steadily increased since 1960, the CO2 concentration has made global temperature increased till now. The concentration sources from key factors, such as gas, solid fuel, liquid, cement, and flaring.

#Q3. For global warming and climate change, what do you think will happen for the land and ocean ratio for the earth?

As the sea level rises, the land on earth would be submerged part by part by the climate and CO2 change. As a result, the solid land of the world will become smaller and smaller. The living land where people have to live in will lose day by day.

#Q4. Can we stop global warming?

Nowadays, we can not prevent the global temperature from increasing, the only thing we can do is not to stop it, but to slow down to speed up the temperature.