GEOSTORM
An overview of global tropical cyclones from 1900-2019
Produced by:
GAO Danning, WANG Shuyue,
ZHANG Bingjie
GENERAL BACKGROUND
It is no longer a fresh topic that humanity will face a series of environmental issues. Various organizations have been calling for actions to protect our environment to ensure its stability in the long run. Right before the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, the global warming movement in 2019 was extremely inspiring, telling the world that the young generations were more than being numb about the environment and were keen to fight for their living conditions. While paying attentions to these gradual changes, people might have neglected the natural disasters that cause massive damage overnight, of which one is tropical storm.
In recent years, an increasing number of meida coverage have reported the tropical storm. It is also noticeable that its affecting area has been expanding overtime. In 2018, the most intense typhone Mangkhut in Hong Kong has caused a record storm surge, uprooted some 1,500 trees, and left hundreds of windows smashed all over the city.
Regarding these facts, we started to ask ourselves: are people aware of the seriousness about tropical storm? Is there a chance that after taking a closer look at this natural disaster, people can get a sense of its trend and furthermore, triggering them to think about what they can do to contribute to our environment? To address these concerns and assumptions, we conducted this research to break down tropical storm in chronological, geographical, media coverage perspectives, and furtherly explore its potential affecting factors with the following research questions:
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RQ1: In the temporal dimension, what is the overall trend of the number of tropical cyclone from 1900-2019? What is the overall trend for tropical cyclone at different levels in last decade?
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RQ2: In the spatial dimension, what are the characteristics of the geographical distribution of tropical cyclone from 1900-2019？
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RQ3: As one of the possible causing factors, does global warming to some extent has a correlation with tropical cyclone?
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RQ4: What does the news coverage say about tropical cyclone---What keywords are most frequently mentioned?
CHRONOLOGICAL TREND (use your mouse to explore interactive charts)
According to the line chart, an overall rising trend of tropical cyclones is transparent from 1900-2019. Since around 1980, the growth trend has been intensified significantly, especially in this century (in about 20 years.
This line has reached its peak, 74 tropical cyclones in a year, thrice in recent two decades, respectively in 2004, 2008, and 2017.
This line chart displays polar tropical cyclones. There are slight rising trends of higher levels of tropical cyclone (level 5 and level 4) from 2009 to about 2018, while a sharp decline appears in the recent two years.
Lower levels of tropical cyclone (level 2 and level 1), separately have a relatively decreasing trend since 2009 and 2012, however, fluctuate and resile in recent years.
(click legend to see lines separately)
GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION
Global Tropical Cyclone DIstribution 1960-2019
(at an interval of 5 years)
According to these maps, the storm-influenced areas have an obvious expansion within middle and low dimensional regionsin the previous one hundred years, and the situation of some affected regions, like North America and Southeast Asia, becomes severer.
Southeast Asia, North America, Oceania, and East Africa are the main affected district. From these disaster areas, the main origins of tropical cyclones are speculated to come from the Northwest Pacific Ocean, Northeast Pacific Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, Southwest Pacific Ocean, and North Indian Ocean. Click to see all interactive maps.
The bar chart shows the top 20 countries with the most times of tropical cyclone over one hundred and twenty years.
There is a significant frequency difference between the top country and the rest. The tropical cyclone frequency of the top country, the Philippines, is double the frequency of the country in second place, China, exceeding three hundred occurrences of tropical cyclones from 1900 to 2019.
Countries, ranked in the top three, are all closed to the Northwest Pacific Ocean, which means the largest number of tropical cyclones is generated there.
TROPICAL CYCLONE & GLOBAL WARMING
From the charts and maps above, a rising frequency and geographic expansion of tropical cyclones could be easily found. There must be some changes among the formation factors of tropical cyclones. It is generally believed that there are six main factors that influence the generation of tropical cyclones, and water temperature is included. In most situations, water temperature needs to reach at least 26.5 °C (79.7 °F), which means the rising land-ocean temperature may have certain relationship with tropical cyclones.
After plotting the relationship between land-ocean temperature and tropical cyclone frequency, there is an obvious positive correlation displayed. Plus, a sharp increase starting from about the zero line worths attention. Nevertheless, the causes and effects of rising ocean-land temperatures and tropical cyclones are complicated, which cannot be simply attributed to global warming. More researches are needed to exposit this question.
WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW?
Besides the numerical analysis, we would also like to conduct a keyword analysis to explore the tropical cyclone in the media coverage perspective. "Eta", "Iota", "Florida" and "Tampa" are the most frequently mentioned words within the news articles about tropical storm in the recent month, as shown in the Wordcloud image. "Eta" and "Iota" are the name of tropical storms, and "Florida" and "Tampa" are the name of the locations. Going back to our initial motives of conducting this research, we could see that there were two tropical storms called "Eta" and "Iota" respectively happening in the recent month and Florida could be the most affected area.
This research question gives us a basic idea about what is happening with tropical cyclone recently. Nevertheless, considering objective limitations like different emphasis on topics, lack of reporting third world countries' news by international media outlets, and the source limits that we encountered, the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the results remain to be completed with more information.
In addition to the news above, we have also discovered factors that may be related to tropical cyclones in the last 20-year New York Times news that we have crawled. As shown in the Wordcloud image, when it comes to news articles about "tropical cyclone and global warming", there are many words mentioned in these articles. Except for the words themselves, there are many words that appear multiple times, such as "weather", "flood", " greenhouse gas" and so on. It means that in addition to being linked to global warming, tropical cyclone may also be linked to floods, greenhouse gas, environment. Although there is not yet enough evidence to suggest a direct link between tropical storms and these words, it gives us an inspiration to do further research.
According to the New York Times data on news articles, it is clear that there has been a general increase in the number of articles appearing at the same time as "tropical cyclone" and "global warming", as shown in the chart. This suggests that tropical storms may have something to do with global warming, which hasn't been proven yet but gives us a hint for further research.
WHERE THE PATH WILL LEAD US
Circling round the topic of tropical cyclone, we first conducted the numerical analysis to explore the chronological and geographical trend of tropical cyclone in the past one hundred years. Then we employed the keyword analysis method to explore the possible effecting factors and the latest trend of tropical cyclone, implementing the news coverage through different approaches.
Environmental issue will be a continuous topic that the humanity is facing. The impact of the gradual changes in the environment has been more significant and more people start to realize the importance of taking immediate actions to create a more sustainable living condition.
In fact, the nature has always been delivering messages to humankind through all channels. Besides listening to the buzzes of the nature, we should also be cautious about the monsters' roaring. Once the natural disasters like tropical cyclone breaks out, it can sweep up everything in no time. This is where our research motivation came from, as we would like to introduce people to this monster and inspire them to cut the possible damage in the future, before more innocent lives and treasuries swept up by this monster.
From establishing the awareness to taking actual actions, there is still a long way for people to go. We believe that with more inspiration injecting into young generations, the environment will keep thriving with their relentless exploration on this path.
