I recently attended the annual post-AGU Gilbert Club meeting in Berkeley California. One of the keynote speakers was Gordon Grant, a professor from Oregon State U. He gave a fantastic talk about the differences between working in a volcanic landscape like the Oregon cascades and a "typical" landscape without kilometers of highly permeable basalts. One thing that has stuck with me since his talk was the following figure. I was inspired by Gordon's beautiful visual aid to try and construct a similar figure using data from my new home, Utah. In this case, I chose the Great Salt Lake as a reference and one of the major rivers that feeds the lake, the Bear River. I also chose to use R, rather than the proprietary software package Gordon used. Above is a typical time series plot of GSL elevation. It provides a lot of information over time about the trends in Lake Level. However, the annual fluctuations are more challenging to piece apart. The elevation of the Great Salt Lake, once plotted by the water day v water year, with the third dimension being color, really comes to life. The high stand around 2000 really stands out, and the high stand in 2011, which was a particularly wet year, is less perceptible. The heat map for the Bear river is also really helpful in visualizing the changes through the seasons and years. For instance, there were multiple high flow years in the early 1980s, where the river dropped a little in the summer but not like the "typical years." The same goes for the high flow years around 2000.
The code to make these figures isn't that complicated, and I think it's a really neat way of showing river discharge or time series in general, to look for trends through time. Code Located here ---> LINK Files located in this folder --> LINK
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AuthorI started learning how to program in High School. For a while now, I've been learning how to effectively use Matlab and R for data analysis and visualization. I will put the codes I've benchmarked and just interesting plots I make here. Archives
September 2019
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