Physicalization of Western U.S. Snowpack data

Project by Jen Liu and Jordan Wirfs-Brock

What's in this repo?

To view a video of our project in action (the best part!) go to: https://youtu.be/1KUeiy6wBUc

Documentation of our project is in the snowpack_writeup_final.pdf file.

Data files

• SNOTEL_download.csv - This is the raw data downloaded from the NRCS custom report generator, with the header text removed
• SNOTEL_stations.csv - This is the raw metadata for station locations (lat/lon) downloaded from the NRCS custom report generator
• snowpack-data.csv - This is the cleaned data file generated from the Python code
• stations-data.csv - This is the cleaned station metadata file generated from the Pyton code
• merged-data.csv - This is the merge of snowpack-data.csv and stations-data.csv (merge done in Fusion Tables)

Images

The folder "SNOTEL-images" contains images from the 5x5 images grid (years 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015, 2018; relative snowpack percentages 0-40%, 40-80%, 80-120%, 120-160%, 160+%) that we used to populate our dynamic display.

Code files

• JWB-SNOTEL-analysis.ipynb - This has the Python code used to do data cleaning and generate the visualizations
• talktome - Arduino files for reading potentiometer
• snowpack_viz - Processing files for displaying data

Sound files

Here's our "sonic color ramp" scale:

• 0 - 40% of historic snowpack - slow drip
• 40 - 80% of historic snowpack - medium drip
• 80 - 120% of historic snowpack - medium trickle
• 120 - 160% of historic snowpack - small stream
• 160+% of historic snowpack - large stream

All sounds are from freesound.org via users InspectorJ, zimbot, Edo333, javetakami and movingplaid.