Americans have very different opinions about whether climate change exists, whether it is man-made, and what actions should be taken to stop it. The purpose of my project is to determine if a relationship exists between a population’s opinion on climate change and the climate they experience. I have calculated several metrics that quantify different aspects of climate behavior at a state and regional level. I constructed these metrics using data about maximum temperatures from the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) and data about storm events from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In order to tell more detailed stories with this data, I built a web application using statistical programming software that creates line plots over time for user-specified climate regions, states, and metrics. Using my web application, I observed that two factors influence the behavior of the climate metrics. First, many of the metrics show trends over time. This was especially true of the maximum temperature metrics, which were observed over a much longer time period than storm events in this project. Second, both the trend and value of the metric are related to which of the nine NOAA-defined climate regions it was calculated in.
Looking into the future, my next step in this project is to integrate data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication that polled Americans on various climate change topics. I plan to build a second web application that allows the user to visualize not only the climate metrics, but also their relationship to public opinion on climate change. This experience has been relevant to my future career as a data analyst by allowing me to gain experience working with data in a field of study that I did not have a lot of previous experience with.
Authors: Lydia Carter, Phuong Ho, Matthew Snyder, Ben Schweitzer, Alison Tuiyott
Faculty Advisors: Dr. Thomas Fisher, Dr. Karsten Maurer, Department of Statistics
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