Back in August 2011, Hurricane Irene struck the mid-Atlantic coast.  This animated graph shows how the storm surge from Irene and the terrestrial flooding from Irene and Tropical Storm Lee (a few days later) impacted water surface elevations in the Delaware Estuary.


This post is the third in a series revisiting older data visualizations using R.  Water surface elevation data is from the NOAA-PORTS system and non-tidal flow at the Delaware River at Trenton and the Schuylkill River at Philadelphia is from USGS NWIS.  You can see similar visualizations of the impact of Superstorm Sandy in the Delaware Estuary and Barnegat Bay.  You can also check out the older version of this same visualization.

In this case, animated graphing efficiently conveys a dense data set from multiple collection platforms in a way that is intuitive and understandable.  The animation is a GIF file which will display automatically in MS PowerPoint in slide show mode.

E-mail me at [email protected] for the full length GIF and the script from the Superstorm Sandy project (same script as this project).