Snow drought

A warming climate has meant less snow in the northern hemisphere, which is a problem when agriculture depends on melting snow to grow crops. Bloomberg reports on the current snow drought situation.

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Past and present California drought severity

It’s been raining a lot here in California, which is helpful, because most of the state has been in severe drought for the past few years. However, the current aging systems can only capture so much of the rainwater, which means we’re still in a drought. For Reuters, Clare Trainor and Minami Funakoshi use a combo heatmap and area plot to show drought severity over the years.

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Reservoir refills in California

There’s been a lot of rain in California, which has been good to relieve some of the pressures from drought, at least in the short-term. For The New York Times, Elena Shao, Mira Rojanasakul, and Nadja Popovich show the sudden bump in water supply.

The areas to show historical averages in the background was a good choice. Very reservoir-ish.

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Exports through the Mississippi River

Drought has caused water levels to drop in the Mississippi River, which is a problem when millions of tons of grain are moved for export via boat. Bloomberg Green breaks it down, including a flow-ish, river-like Sankey Diagram to show where grain exports go.

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Worst drought in Europe, in 500 years

Dominic Royé mapped river discharge in Europe over the past few months:

This climate change thing seems real.

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Drought extent by region

For Scientific American, Cédric Scherer and Georgios Karamanis charted drought extent by region using a grid of stacked bar charts. Each cell represents a year for a corresponding region, and color represents drought intensity.

Compare this view to more map-centric ones. This version focuses more on time than it does geography. One isn’t better than the other. Just different.

See the full version here.

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Map of drying reservoirs in the west

To show water levels in California’s drying reservoirs, The Washington Post used upside down triangles to represent each reservoir.

I like the idea to use an encoding that kind of looks like a reservoir, but my brain can’t help but read the fill level through height instead of area. Maybe the tradeoff isn’t worth it in this case? Compare this against a circle representation from 2015.

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Measuring centuries-old droughts through tree rings

To measure drought in the present day, we use data from sensors that constantly record environmental conditions, such as soil moisture, precipitation, and snow water content. But to measure drought thousands of years ago, researchers can use tree rings. Alvin Chang for The Guardian shows how the researchers line up old rings to gather historical data and then do that across a region.

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Drought in the Western United States

In what’s become a recurring theme almost every year, the western United States is experiencing drought, much of it exceptional or extreme. Nadja Popovich for The New York Times has the small multiple maps to show June conditions each year since 2000.

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California looks green again

In case you didn’t hear, California had a bit of a drought problem for the past few years. We complained about not enough rain constantly, and we finally got a lot of it this year. Now we complain that there’s too much rain (because you know, we have to restore balance). On the upside, the state looks a lot greener and less barren these days. David Yanofsky for Quartz has got your satellite imagery right here.

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