March 1, 2020
Global Warming Analysis
World temperature maps and deviations from 1975 to 2015, visualized from historical climate data.
TL;DR — Four decades of global temperature records (1975–2015) turned into color-coded, zoomable world map tiles — computing each region’s deviation from its long-run baseline so the warming signal jumps out. Built in Scala with an interactive Scala.js / Leaflet viewer.
Stack — Scala, sbt, Scala.js, Leaflet, spatial interpolation
The idea here was to make four decades of climate data something you can actually see, rather than read as a single headline number. Working in Scala, I took historical global temperature records, computed how much each region deviated from its long-run baseline, spatially interpolated the readings, and rendered the results as color-coded world map tiles — along with an interactive viewer that steps through the years from 1975 to 2015. Mapping the anomalies instead of the raw temperatures is what makes it click: the warming signal jumps straight out, and you can see exactly where change has been most pronounced. It turns a big, abstract dataset into an intuitive visual story you can scroll through year by year, and a quiet reminder of how much a good visualization can let the data argue for itself.