Cartograms for Use in Forecasting Weather-Driven Natural Hazards |
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Authors: | Florian Pappenberger Hannah L Cloke Calum A Baugh |
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Institution: | 1. European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Reading, UK;2. Department of Geography and Environmental Science and Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, Reading, UK;3. Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden;4. Centre of Natural Hazards and Disaster Science, CNDS, Uppsala, Sweden |
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Abstract: | This paper evaluates the potential of using cartograms for visualizing and interpreting forecasts of weather-driven natural hazards in the context of global weather forecasting and early warning systems. The use of cartograms is intended to supplement traditional cartographic representations of the hazards in order to highlight the severity of an upcoming event. Cartogrammetric transformations are applied to forecasts of floods, heatwaves, windstorms and snowstorms taken from the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) forecast archive. Key cartogram design principles in standard weather forecast visualization are tested. Optimal cartogram transformation is found to be dependent on geographical features (such as coastlines) and forecast features (such as snowstorm intensity). For highly spatially autocorrelated weather variables used in analysing several upcoming natural hazards such as 2m temperature anomaly, the visualization of the distortion provides a promising addition to standard forecast visualizations for highlighting upcoming weather-driven natural hazards. |
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Keywords: | Cartogram data visualization weather forecasts early warning natural hazards |
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