Most storms only last a few hours, and a daily rainfall value is usually adequate. Therefore I added one more line of SAS code to turn the maps into a GIF animation! but it sure would be nice to have an easy way to see all the maps without having to do any work (such as scrolling and clicking). Having the five separate maps is great if you're wanting to scrutinize each map and mouse-over the cities to see the detailed data for each day. You can click the images to see the interactive maps, with HTML mouse-over text showing details for each of the blue bubbles: Here are the maps for each of the 5 days the hurricane was moving across the Carolinas. And to add a bit of context and timing, I added the path of the hurricane (in red). I then used Proc Geocode to estimate the latitude/longitude center of the cities, and plotted the data on a map using blue bubbles (with the area of the bubble proportional to the amount of rain that day). Since there were multiple gauges in many of the cities, I calculated an average value for each city. I didn't see an easy way to download their data from the table, therefore I paged through the dozens of table pages, and copy-n-pasted them one page at a time into a text file, and then wrote a bit of SAS code to import the text. Therefore I decided to see what I could do in the form of a make-over. It was interesting seeing the data plotted on the map, but the hurricane rainfall amounts didn't really convey to me and say "We just had a flood of biblical proportions!" The county outlines and names seemed to jump out more than the data values (colored dots). You could also view a map of the rainfall data on their website. Here's a snapshot of some of the rain gauge readings for NC: They have an interface that lets you select a state and date, it it provides you with a table. I did a bit of Web searching, and found the very cool website, where volunteer weather observers report the daily rainfall in their area, and submit it to a database. So, which cities got the most rain, and how much did they get? Seems like the perfect challenge for The Graph Guy! Here's a photo from my friend Paul, showing an example of the flooding:įortune reported that the storm could drop 10 trillion gallons of water on NC (that's enough to fill 15 million Olympic-sized swimming pools, or enough for everyone on Earth to take 69 10-minute showers). The hurricane moved very slowly, spending 4 or 5 days over our state as its rotation picked up moisture from the ocean and dropped it on the land. But what it lacked in strength, it made up for in rainfall. Luckily it lost a bit of strength before it came ashore, and didn't hit us as a category 4 storm. Hurricane Florence recently came through our area. Little bitty stingin' rain, and big ol' fat rain, rain that flew in sideways, and sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath." Was that a quote from the Forrest Gump movie, or something said regarding Hurricane Florence? Could be either one! "We been through every kind of rain there is.
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