cartoDB

Humidity, Sunshine Across The U.S.

By Matt Stiles | Matt Stiles | Topics: Weather

With summer winding down, I wondered: How much does the amount of sunshine and humidity vary among U.S. cities?

First, this map shows the average percentage of possible sunshine by city. (Yuma, AZ, has sun about 90% of the year; Juneau, AK, gets it about 30%). Larger bubbles represent higher percentages of sunshine (click the images for larger, interactive versions):

This map shows (a slightly different) list of cities and their annual average relative humidity in the afternoon:

I’m not sure whether these maps are effective — or whether they should be maps at all. But I wanted to try another quick experiment with CartoDB.

Data source: NOAA | Download: Sunshine, Humidity

Mapping Crime Data With CartoDB

By Matt Stiles | Matt Stiles | Topics: Crime, Tutorials

Today I started playing with CartoDB, an online data mapping service that reminds me in some ways of both Google Fusion Tables and TileMill.

To start, I grabbed a simple test data set — five months of geocoded major crimes in D.C. from January to May this year — to check out some features. One I like is allowing users to query their data in the browser-based interface and filter for specific types of records.

Here, for example, I narrowed the map to show just thefts:

Assaults with deadly weapons:

Vehicle thefts:

Thefts from vehicles:

Robberies:

Homicides:

I made these maps in less than five minutes, so I’m sure there are much more useful stories to tell with the tool. There are also many, many features I didn’t explore, like the ability to style the map using Carto, the CSS-like language, rather than the UI.

Anyway, give it a shot, and let me know what you build.