While preparing for the real-time challenge of Election night, the WNYC Data News Team -- and the entire city -- turned its attention to an oncoming storm.
For our Hurricane Sandy coverage, we quickly built and maintained several data projects to help convey information people needed. All used open, public data and several were updated regularly -- either automatically or by hand.
Our projects included:
- The evacuation map above, built using public shapefiles from New York City's Department of Emergency Management.
- A storm-surge map for the entire New Jersey and New York coastlines, stitched together from a variety of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers shapefiles.
- A Hurricane Tracker to watch the storm's forecast track and its radar echo, fed by four real-time feeds from the National Weather Service.
- A Transit Tracker with the latest information about several public transportaiton systems, driven by a Google spreadsheet updated by a half-dozen producers and reporters from transportation agency tweets, websites and public announcements.
- A live flood-gauge map showing where the water was rising, driven by a real-time feed from the National Weather Service.
- A traffic map for the back-to-work crush sans subways, fed live by the Google Maps traffic layer.
- A subway-restoration map, updated several times a day with new maps issued by the city transit agency.
For details on the data, follow the source links on each project.
With more time, we would have worked more on the aethetics. But time wasn't something we had much of, so we did our best to be accurate and clear given the resources available.
Read more about the WNYC Data News team's thinking behind our Sandy coverage.