November 1, 2012

Hurricane Sandy Signals

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Despite all the media coverage of Hurricane Sandy, I found it hard to get a sense of the scale of the storm and the destruction it caused – there’s plenty of noise, but hard to find the signals.

A few sources of information I’ve found useful are:

A map in yesterday’s NZ Herald giving useful size context to the storm:

The New York Times is real-time graphing and mapping the number of customers affected by power outages in New York city after Hurricane Sandy:

For another good overview divided by different types of damage in New York city, see: Assessing the Damage From Hurricane Sandy.

Google has an interactive crisis map.

There were not-so-useful statistics being used such as “Facebook Sees Mentions of ‘Hurricane Sandy’ Spike 1 Million Percent”.

The Atlantic does a nice job of verifying social media photos of Sandy.

Have you found any good resources online for getting a sense of the scale and destruction of Hurricane Sandy? Let me know!

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Rachel Cunliffe is the co-director of CensusAtSchool and currently consults for the Department of Statistics. Her interests include statistical literacy, social media and blogging. See all posts by Rachel Cunliffe »

Comments

  • avatar
    Godfrey Bridger

    Thanks for the post Rachel, I too was suffering from the effects you described. Unsurprisingly, but still frustratingly, TV is the worst offender. The links you provided were excellent.

    12 years ago