Tag Archives: rain

Have you ever seen the rain?

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The 20th session of the Conference of the Parties and the 10th session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol is held from 1 to 12 December. For COP 20 / CPM 10 delegates from around the world increased their carbon footprint by heading to Lima, Peru, to hopefully produce more than just hot air. So again it is time to speak about the weather…or climate.

Animation of a gridded cartogram projection of global annual precipitation patterns
(click for larger version)

This animation is a visualisation which I originally produced for my PhD research and which was published in my book Rediscovering the World. Continue reading →

Shared rain

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This April has been the wettest April on record in the UK, while parts of the country are also in official drought – leading to headlines of the wettest drought on record.
The miserable weather was (is) a good opportunity to finally produce a high-resolution version of the map series that I created during my PhD research and which I presented at last year’s conference of the Society of Cartographers in Plymouth. Continue reading →

When does it always rain on us?

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Where rain (or more precisely: precipitation) is affecting most people, and where it falls mainly on uninhabited land has been part of the presentation that I gave at this year’s SoC meeting in Plymouth (where the delegates witnessed some of the rain from the maps shown below, but enjoyed a little bit of the late summer’s sunshine as well). An animation of these maps and the annual precipitation map have been published on this website last week (see here).
The following series of maps shows monthly precipitation patterns derived from monitored climate data of approximately 50 years (1950-2000, data obtained from http://worldclim.org/). The underlying popoulation grid is a gridded cartogram transformation of the global population distribution population data from SEDAC). As explained in more detail in the previous entry, this representation is a view of how the world’s population is directly exposed to the monthly precipitation patterns, shrinking all those unpopulated parts of the land surface while proportionally increasing the size of land according to the total number of people living there. The choropleth overlay visualises precipitation just as in a conventional map (also shown in the inset map. This shows, when it rains on humanity throughout the year – month by month: Continue reading →

Where does it always rain on us?

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Map Animation / Gridded Population Cartogram of Rainfall (Precipitation) patterns in relation to people

Does it never rain in Southern California? And can we find the rain in Spain mainly in the plain? And what does that all mean for the people living in these places? Where does rain matter most for the population? In some places, it can be a much needed scarcity, elsewhere it appears in a much dreaded surplus. Wherever it is falling, rain matters a lot where people are. Partly, the global population distribution can be explained by climate patterns, with rain being a crucial factor for the agriculture in a region. In my presentation for the delegate’s session at this year’s 47th annual meeting of the British Society of Cartographers in Plymouth I took a closer look at the weather, or to be more precise, at climate patterns and their visualisation using gridded cartograms. Part of the presentation was an animation showing the global precipitation patterns projected on a gridded population cartogram. The following map shows the annual precipitation in relation to the global population distribution. The small map inset gives the conventional view of the same data, demonstrating how the perspective changes when seeing the same topic from two different views: Continue reading →