I’ve written an article for The Williams Record that seeks to contextualize the unusually warm and light-on-snow January we’ve been experiencing in Williamstown, Massachusetts. As with any piece that connects weather and climate, one of the challenges here was to give people a sense of how this winter stacked up against others, as well as what some important longer-term trends were.
With a lot of data at my disposal, I had a particularly fun time trying to put things in perspective via some infographics, which can do things (such as expressing variance in an intuitive way) that even carefully worded sentences cannot. Because of “finite attention spans” and the “existence of other articles on the page,” not all of the charts I made ended up in the final iteration of the piece — but if you’re so inclined, you can take a look at all of them here. Thanks to the Williams College Environmental Analysis Lab for making all of this super interesting data available to students!