This is similar to a basic version of what I'd like my project to look like.Project Description: The basic idea of this project is to visualize various types of pollution in the United States over the past 15 years. Visually, it will display a 2D map of the U.S. and use ‘clouds’ of colors over various regions to represent various types of pollution as well as a ‘health risk rating’ to display the relative health risk of living in a given area. I had originally planned for this to be a current, updating report of the current state of pollution in given areas of the U.S., but I have found that this type of data is generally compiled annually and that the most significant changes take place over the course of several months rather than on a day to day basis. I decided that a better route, then, would be to create a visualization of the progression of pollution in the U.S. over time. The number of years that are going to be represented is tentatively at 15 (this is approximately the extent to which this data is available, give or take a couple years), however this may fluctuate depending on the amount of data included for each year. Ideally, the visualization will include representations of air pollution, relative health risk, and contribution to acid rain for each represented region. These representations would obviously fluctuate and change as the visualization progresses through time, which will be controllable by the user.
This is similar to a basic version of what I'd like my project to look like.
Goals/Features: Air Pollution Display:This feature will display colored ‘clouds’ to represent air pollution in a given region. This will reflect overall air quality of a region, rather than data concerning each individual type of air pollutant, as that would be overwhelming and uninformative. The size and shape of the cloud will denote the region it represents, and the opacity will denote the severity of the pollution. Health risk: This feature would display a rating, most likely from 0 to 5, denoting the relative health risks associated with living in a given area. These would be displayed as a line of up to 5 skulls or perhaps skull and crossbones images, 5 being the highest health risk and 0 representing little or no health risk for a given area. Contribution to acid rain: There are a few types of air pollutants that contribute the most to the formation of acid rain, so this feature would take the levels of those pollutants into account and determine a given area’s responsibility for acid rain. This would be represented by the color of the air pollution cloud, since they are directly related. Hotter colors would represent a higher presence of acid rain contributors, whereas cooler colors would denote a lack of these pollutants. Time progression slider: This would a slider across the bottom of the display that would control what range in time is being displayed. The user will be able to slide this control from side to side and see how levels of pollution have changed over the years.
Work Schedule:
Resources: The only resource I have needed thus far is the EPA Website. It contains numerous links to other useful sites, as well a very thorough database of the information needed for this project.