Intensity Time-Profiles of Twelve Category Five Hurricanes

The past 26 Atlantic hurricane seasons featured a total of 13 category five hurricanes, 12 of which are shown in the chart below. (The 13th is Emily, from the same infamous year as Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, which I left out as the only of the 13 to not have its name retired.) The chart chronicles the change in the intensity of these storms over time, and marks points along the hurricane’s lifetime when landfalls occur.

Both Hurricane Andrew and Hurricane Katrina made a first landfall in Florida and a second landfall in Louisiana, but in the course of time between these two landfalls, Andrew weakened, whereas Katrina strengthened.

Electing Good Presidents: the States’ Report Cards

This project is a collaboration with betaveros, the author of BetaWorldProblems (betaveros.wordpress.com).

Last year, the American Political Science Association polled political scientists on how they would rank the presidents of the United States. In the below chart, we mark which states (plus DC) voted for each president in the presidential election history of the United States (as indicated by the presence of a number in the row of a state in the column for a president), giving them points depending on the ranking of these presidents, ranging from +21 for the best-ranked president (Lincoln) to -21 for the worst-ranked president (Buchanan). In the rightmost column is the average score per election for each state, reflecting how good a state has been at voting for presidents that end up (at least from the point of view of present American political science experts) being considered the good ones.

Decimal quantities exist in some entries. These are cases where a state decided to allot some, but not all, of their electoral votes to the candidate that won the election, and thus are given a proportional number of the points for that president.

Here’s a map showing the averages. Greens are positive averages; the darker the green, the higher the average.

The Cities and Towns of I-80

Below are all cities and towns along I-80 of at least 10000 people, charted at their position on I-80 with a height corresponding to how many people they are home to.

Half the Population of Each State, as a Contiguous Set of Counties

In each of the fifty states as depicted below, the counties (or in the case of Louisiana, parishes; or for Alaska, boroughs) in it shaded in red altogether are home to more than half the state’s population. That is, more people in the state live in the red region than in the entire rest of the state.

Population and Area Proportions of the 50 US States

This graph displays, for each of the 50 states, what proportion of all 50 states’ population and area reside in that state.

Land area is used here, as it makes more sense for comparison to human population than total area.

Population numbers are from the “2010” census.

Note that neither the total area nor the total population here (the latter more significantly) equals the total area or population of the United States because totality here represents the 50 states, and does not include US territories.

For comparison, here’s what this chart would look like 50 years earlier.

Average Seasonal Lags in 32 American Cities

Even though the sun is highest at noon and furthest away at midnight (up to time zone discretization and daylight savings), a typical day is not hottest at noon and not coldest at midnight. This is because, for example, after noon passes, the sun continues to heat up the earth more, and the temperature only begins dropping once the rate at which the sun warms the surface of the earth has fallen back below the rate at which the earth radiates heat back out. A typical day demonstrates a diurnal lag.

Likewise, the summer and winter solstices, despite having the respective longest and shortest amounts of sunshine hours, are typically not the hottest and coldest days of the year. There is a usually a seasonal lag, that is, the hottest and coldest days of the year usually fall many days after the solstice.

Many topographical features affect the degree of seasonal lag, and often amounts of summer and winter lag are different, and differently different across different locations.

This chart displays several statistics together. For each of 32 cities in the continental United States, the average hottest day and average coldest day of the year for each city are marked, and each mark spans from the average low to the average high for that city on that day.

In parentheses next to each city name are the average numbers of days of lag past the solstice in summer and winter.

Some marks are wider than other marks to make ranges clearer for cities that have the same amount of a particular seasonal lag and thus may have overlapping marks.

Record Highs and Lows in American Cities

This chart shows the wide span of record highs and lows across the many states in the USA. The data points are colored by region in the USA, to aid general comparisons among regions of the United States.

Notice that some regions have more variety in represented temperature ranges than others; for instance, the region of mountains and deserts between the West Coast and the Great Plains displays a particularly vast span. Most spectacularly, note how far apart Phoenix and Flagstaff are on this chart despite less than 250 kilometers (150 miles) separating them physically. This stark difference demonstrates that local topography far dwarfs general location within a continent in effect on climate.

That having been said, note that this chart should not be interpreted as a complete picture on climate. Other important aspects of climate, particularly precipitation and humidity, are not represented on this chart at all; Californian and Floridian cities are quite near to one another on this extreme temperature chart, but have very different climates in general. Also note that these are *record* temperatures, not *typical* summer and winter temperatures, and that the amount by which record temperatures exceed the usual can differ from location to location.

Map of the Continental US, Scaled by Interstate Number

In interstate highways in the United States, even-numbered main highways are generally east-west with increasing highway numbers from south to north, and odd-numbered main highways are generally north-south with increasing highway numbers from west to east.

If one decides to fix the map of the United States to a grid of interstate numbers, we produce the map below. Notice distance skews that make the fact that the highway numbering rules are only a rule of thumb obvious: highways are frequently not spaced anywhere near to scale with numerical difference, and highways sometimes move to the ‘wrong’ side of a ‘parallel’ highway, making, in a notable example in Ohio, Columbus move southwest of Cincinnati.

This map is a rework of a map of this character that I produced two and a half years ago. The previous one was drawn with Microsoft Paint; this one was produced in Raphael.js.