Remembering Tornadoes — A Data Scientist’s Perspective
Given that it’s tornado season and I’m a life-long Oklahoman, I think it’s important we construct an educational data visualization that describes and tells the story of the most significant tornadoes for the past 65 years.
While there are a number of great tools online that contain historical data of all tornadoes, few focus on the ones that wrote history, changed how weather is reported, and altered lives.
So, join me in this process from beginning to end. We’ll mine data using Python, check for significance and look for correlations in R, and design an easy to understand and informative visualization using D3.js. I will be discussing all road blocks, thought processes, and errors along the way. By the end of this project I hope to inform and educate people not only on tornadoes, but also shed light on pivotal (and also free) data science tools.
First up, let’s find some data.