Building an Interactive Drought Relief Map
Quick Links: Project Website | Source Code on Github I recently published an interactive map that shows the current US Drought Monitor levels and the 5-day National Weather Service Quantified Precipitation Forecast (QPF). As stated on the site, "by overlaying these two datasets, you can analyze where drought conditions may improve or worsen over the next 5 days." Background As of Sept. 8, 2016, all of Massachusetts was under some level of drought or dryness There were two primary reasons that led to the creation of this site. The first is that I had been reading about the Mapbox GL JS framework and wanted some sort of project I could build using it. Secondly, living in eastern Massachusetts, I was well aware of the worsening drought that has gripped the state for effectively the past 2 years. While attending a Maptime Boston meetup back in July where there was a discussion about intersecting and overlaying different datasets, I came up with the idea to create this product. Technical Details The US National Weather Service provides a significant cache of its products in common geographic formats. They provide their QPF formats in both Shapefile/KML (vector) and GRIB2 (raster) formats, so it's...
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