Hot surfaces, stored energy

In hot places, the ground can heat to higher temperatures than the air, which causes severe burns to someone who stumbles or accidentally touches a surface. For Reuters, Mariano Zafra describes the absorption and release of energy with a series of graphics.

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Welcome to Meltsville

It’s getting hot in cities around the world, each city with its own set of problems. The Washington Post combined all the problems into one fictional city called Meltsville. There are travel delays because the road is melting, bridges are cracking from heat expansion, and it’s generally a hard place to live.

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Mapping extreme heat

For Bloomberg, Marie Patino reports on the shifting design choices for mapping weather extremes. The rainbow color scheme and sunny icons aren’t cutting it anymore.

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Mapping the cool spots in hot cities

As city centers heat up, people search for cooler areas. For Bloomberg Green, Laura Millan, Hayley Warren and Jeremy Scott Diamond mapped the neighborhoods for a handful of hot cities that have something to cool the area:

Satellite images produced by the European Space Agency, working in part with data from NASA and the US Geological Survey, now have a high enough resolution to allow for temperature variations to be parsed on a street-by-street level. These snapshots of heat differences offer clear evidence of cooling strategies that can counteract what researchers term the “urban heat island effect,” in which city temperatures get that extra boost.

Bodies of water, greenery, and reflective surfaces.

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Timelines for record temperatures

Speaking of the heat wave in Europe, Pierre Breteau for Le Monde charted record high temperatures using a step chart for each weather station in France:

These graphs represent, for a part of the 146 stations for which Météo-France provided us with the data, the level of the most extreme temperatures ever recorded and their date.

The data are fragmentary because it is difficult to go back beyond the 1990’s, or even the August 2003 heat wave, and only those with a historical record of at least 20 years are shown below.

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Melting popsicles to visualize a heat wave

Many European countries are experience record high temperatures, so The Washington Post used melting popsicles to attach something relatable to the numbers and standard heatmap. But:

It turns out that it takes popsicles much longer to melt than we had expected. In this unscientific experiment, the shortest melt time was around 12 minutes, in 90 degrees Fahrenheit, under Madrid’s beating sun. It took as long as 50 minutes earlier in the day and in the shade.

I wish they’d taken it one or two steps further with a more scientific method. Try to use the same color or type of popsicle, put the popsicles out at the same time of day, or get a time-lapse of a control popsicle so that there’s a way to compare something. As it was made, the melting popsicles are just background images.

I’m sure there were time and resource constraints across countries, but it was such a good idea.

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Why the city is hotter than the suburb

NPR used video from a thermographic camera to explain why cities tend to be hotter than their surrounding areas. Straightforward and a good complement to the video.

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