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Recap: Goal of the Project

Our Project attempts to provide tools for the purpose of weather data analysis. We aim to create an interactive visualization that enables intuitive analysis of climate change’s impact on Canadian weather. While it is not possible to directly correlate individual extreme weather events to climate change, it is possible to analyze patterns over time to find clear indications of climate change impact. That is why this area of topic is well suited for an analysis through an interactive visualization, as opposed to a static visualization.

Analytic Scope

Our first step in designing a suitable interface was defining a set of research questions, each within different scopes. Our goal to communicate our findings to a layman required us to delve into much detail. In our current global situation, climate change is an important topic that impacts politics, economies and everyday life - essentially a topic which affects everyone. As such, we aim to create a platform that makes relevant data accessible to people without a background in data analytics or similar expertise .

Our central research question is: What is climate change’s (CC) impact on Canadian weather?

With that as our start point, we devised the following subcomponent-questions:

  1. What are the contributing factors of climate change?
    1. What is the relationship between CO2 content in the air and human caused CO2 emissions?
    2. Who causes our CO2 emissions?
  2. Since climate impacts weather, are there indications of Canadian weather behaving abnormally?
    1. With sea ice expected to melt as a result of CC, is there a noticeable impact on ocean level patterns?
    2. Is there a noticeable change in temperature patterns?
    3. Is there a noticeable change in precipitation patterns?
    4. Is there a noticeable change in extreme weather patterns?
  3. Is there a correlation between CO2 levels and Canadian weather abnormalities, which would indicate CC impact? If yes, what is it?
    1. Can we apply data used to answer previous questions, to find a statistical correlation between CO2 levels and weather abnormalities?

Goal of Assignment 4

The goal of Assignment 4 was to get started with the implementation of our Project. Because of a lack of time we decided to focus on high-level question 1): “What are the contributing factors of climate change?”. The reason we chose to focus on this question is that it requires less complex datasets to answer. To answer it, we need to look at atmospheric CO2 concentration and at human-caused CO2 emissions. This data is less complex than the weather datasets we would need to answer high-level questions 2-3.