The Tardiest Airlines & Airports

The US Flight Delay Visualization is an interactive map which shows you which states have the tardiest airports. The map uses 2017 data from the US Department of Transportation to show departure and arrival delays in each U.S. state.

The choropleth layer on the map reflects the number of flights which arrived on time in each state. If you hover over a state on the map you can view the exact percentage of flights in that state that arrived on time. The map also includes major airports in the United States. If you hover over an airport's marker on the map then you can see the percentage of flights which arrived on time at that airport.


FiveThirtyEight's Which Flight Will Get You There Fastest? can also show you the tardiest airports in the USA. FiveThirtyEight's visualization includes additional data on individual routes between airports. It is therefore able to also provide information about the tardiest airlines and routes in the USA.

On first loading the tool a table shows you the number of minutes the busiest airports typically add to a flight. If you select an airport from this list you can view all the other airports it flies to on the map. These flights are color-coded to reflect the typical flight time and minutes typically added to the flight time.

You can also use the map to pick a departure airport and destination airport. This will then show you the typical flight time and the performance of all the airlines which fly that route.

FiveThirtyEight's interactive is older than the US Flight Delay Visualization map. It is therefore based on older data (January to December 2014) so may not be as accurate.

Why Cape Town is Running Dry

Theewaterskloof dam provides half of Cape Town's water. It is about to run dry. According to the latest estimates Cape Town will run out of water on April 16th.

Day Zero: How Cape Town is running out of water is a Guardian article exploring the reasons behind Cape Town's current drought. The article includes an effective visualization of how the drought has effected the dam. A transition between two satellite images of the Theewaterskloof dam, shows the water levels when full and how it looks now. The article also includes mini cut out maps of Cape Town's four key reservoirs, showing how the water in them has shrunk since 2014. The satellite imagery in the article comes from Sentinel 2 & Landsat 8 (to trace the reservoir outlines).

Using a series of satellite images can be particularly effective in showing the scope of water loss in an area. For example in documenting the loss of the Aral Sea. The Aral Sea was once the fourth largest lake in the world. Due to Soviet irrigation projects the Aral Sea is now less than 10% of the size it once was. In fact the eastern basin of what used to be the Aral Sea is now called the Aralkum Desert

Lots of people have used satellite images to document how the Aral Sea has dwindled in size over time. This NASA Earth Observatory feature uses a series of images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite to document the water loss in the Aral Sea from 2000-2017.

Drowning Berlin

The Island of Berlin is an attempt to visualize how Berlin could be effected by rising sea levels. The visualization provides a dramatic (if not exactly accurate) model of how global warming could effect Berlin.

The Island of Berlin uses WebGL to create a 3D model of Berlin. The model depicts Berlin as surrounded by a vast sea. Using the slide control you can raise the level of this sea to view which areas of Berlin would remain above water at different sea levels.

Obviously Berlin is not on the top of a mountain. It therefore does not have a significantly higher elevation than the area surrounding the city. The Island of Berlin therefore does create an overly dramatic visualization. Under most models of rising sea levels Berlin will not end up an island surrounded by a vast sea. Therefore this type of visualization would work a lot better using an actual island, for example Reunion Island.

Hans Hack's map of Berlin was inspired by Nicolas Durou's Maquette. Maquette is a WebGL 3D model of Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean. This 3D model also allows you to adjust sea levels to visualize how the island could be effected by global warming. The Maquette model includes a population layer which is able to provide an estimation of the number of people on the island who would be effected by different levels of rising seas.

The Geography of Super Bowl Fandom

Most people in the north eastern states of the USA will be watching the Super Bowl today. But which team will they be supporting?

Google Trends has released an interactive map called NFL Playoffs 2018 which shows the most searched NFL team in each United States county. From this map we can guess at which areas of the north east USA will be supporting which team in today's Super Bowl.

Of the two teams in the Super Bowl the New England Patriots are the most searched team in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and the eastern part of New York. It seems that they will have all of New England pretty much rooting for them today.

On the other hand the Philadelphia Eagles don't appear to be even the most popular team in Pennsylvania. More counties seem to support the Pittsburgh Steelers in Pennsylvania than the Philadelphia Eagles. However the Philadelphia Eagles are the most supported team in the eastern counties in Pennsylvania. They are also the most popular team in New Jersey and Delaware.

In 2014 Facebook released a NFL American fandom map. The map shows the most 'liked' NFL teams in each county of the USA. The Atlantic has a large image of the map in its Geography of NFL Fandom article. This map paints a similar picture to Google's map. The New England Patriots do rule in New England while the Eagles have a much smaller area of support in New Jersey, Delaware and the most eastern counties of  Pennsylvania.

Based purely on the geographical size of their respective support I announce that the New England Patriots win this year's Super Bowl fandom award.

Mapping American Ancestry

The USA is a country of immigrants. You can see the influence that different ancestry groups have made on American culture all around you. However your local culture might be influenced more by some ancestry groups than others depending on where you live in the United States.

German-Americans are the biggest ancestry group. In the 2016 American Community Survey 44 million people said that they had German ancestry. As you can see from the screenshot above a lot of them live in the Midwest. The second biggest ancestry group is Irish-Americans. A lot of Americans who claim Irish ancestry live in the Northeast of the country.

Esri's Ancestry map shows the number of Americans claiming to have ancestry from any one of 25 different countries around the world. The map shows how many people in each county reported belonging to one of 25 different ancestry groups.The ancestry data for the map comes from the American Community Survey 2011-2015.

The percentage of citizens reporting as coming from an ancestry group is shown by the color of the squares placed over each county. The size of the squares represents the number of the population who reported coming from that ancestry group. You can select from the 25 different ancestry groups by clicking on the 'content' button.

The Three Word Weather Map

All British weather can be described in just three words. Those three words are:

wet, windy and cold

The UK's Met office has therefore decided to release a new interactive map which eschews weather symbols in favor of three word descriptions. You could think of it as the illegitimate love child of the #UKsnow Map and What3Words.

#3wordweather is an interactive map which describes the local weather in just three words - as tweeted by people across the UK. #3wordweather is actually a serious experiment by the Met Office to learn what words people use to describe the weather in different areas of the UK. You can get involved by tweeting a three word description of the weather, the name of your nearest town and the hashtag #3wordweather.

Looking at the map it is apparent that despite having only three types of weather (wet, windy and cold) the British have thousands of different words for describing these three states. Here are some of the words currently being used on the map: pish, nithering, hoolie, baltic, baltic cauld, manky, parky and brassy (in other words it is currently wet, windy and cold in the UK).

Segregating America's Schools

Schools in the southern states of America are as segregated now as they were 50 years ago. It isn't just the southern states where schools are segregated along racial lines. Because of the residential segregation that exists in nearly every community in America the majority of black children end up attending schools where the majority of students are black and white children attend schools where the majority of students are white.

In We can draw school zones to make classrooms less segregated Vox looks at how school districts can be gerrymandered to make them less segregated. The article includes a map tool which allows you to visualize how segregated schools currently are in your town. If you enter your school district into this tool you can view a choropleth map showing the percentage of students in each elementary school zone who were black or Hispanic in the 2013 school year.

The map allows you to view how the situation is in your district using the current zoning regulations with how it would look if students were just assigned to their nearest school. Beneath the map you can see a graph which reveals if your local zoning regulations are lessening school segregation or making segregation worse.

Mapping the Nether ('lower') + lands

On February 1st 1952 the Netherlands experienced a disastrous flood. The North Sea flood of 1953 caused 1,836 deaths and widespread property damage. One reason why the flood was so devastating is because the Netherlands is a very low and flat country. About 26% of the country & 21% of its population is located below sea level and only about 50% of its land is more than one metre above sea level.

You can see which parts of the Netherlands are above and below sea level on a new interactive map called Visualising the height of the Netherlands. This map shows the height of the Netherlands in comparison to sea level. All of the country on the map is shaded to represent elevation. Areas colored blue have an elevation below sea level. Areas shaded yellow have an elevation above sea level.

The map includes a number of interactive elevation charts. Click on the markers on the map and you can load an elevation chart which shows an elevation profile running west to east across the Netherlands at that point. This elevation profile is interactive. If you hover over the profile a red dot shows that location on the map.

Worldwide Population Density

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a 3D WebGL visualization of Europe's population called 3D Global Human Settlement. This 3D model uses data from the European Commission's Global Human Settlement Layer, to show the population of Europe as peaks and troughs, where height represents population density.

Since I wrote about this 3D map Alasdair Rae, of the University of Sheffield, has been exploring population density in Europe in much more detail. In Think your country is crowded? These maps reveal the truth about population density across Europe Rae has mapped Eurostat’s population density grid data for 2011. This map visualizes the population density in each square kilometer in Europe.

He has also created a table which shows the population density of each European country. This table includes a column showing how many people in each country live in the the most densely populated one square kilometer of that country. By comparing this figure for each country you can see where the most densely populated square kilometers are in Europe. In Barcelona more than 53,000 people inhabit a single 1km². This is the most densely populated area in Europe. Paris has the second most densely populated km², with a 1km² containing more than 50,000 people.

Alasdair Rae's article includes a brief discussion of some of the most densely populated areas outside of Europe. He also links to Duncan Smith's interactive map of World Population Density. Another interactive map which shows worldwide population data is SEDAC Population Estimator (GPWv4). This interactive map uses NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) data to show where the world's population lives.

The SEDAC Population Estimator map includes a tool to draw an area on the map to see an estimate of the population that live there. You can therefore draw a square kilometer on the map to make your own comparisons with Alasdair's most densely populated square kilometers in Europe. For example, I drew a square kilometer at random in Dhaka, Bangladesh and the map gave me a population estimate of 107,804. This is over twice as many people as the 52,000 people living in Europe's most densely populated 1km² in Barcelona.

The Geography of Restaurant Food

Google News Lab has been busy mapping America's major food regions. Using the location history of Google Maps users they have been researching what type of restaurants are the most popular across the United States. In What is the Pizza Capital of the US? you can discover where Pizza restaurants are more popular than Mexican food and where BBQ restaurants are more popular than seafood restaurants.

An interactive map, What is the More Popular Restaurant to Visit?, allows you to directly compare the popularity of any two different types of restaurant on one map of the United States. For example, you can use the map to see where Chinese restaurants are more popular than Indian restaurants or where in the U.S. steak restaurants are more visited than burger restaurants.

As an Englishman, where there is an Indian restaurant on every other street, the thing that struck me most about this map was the criminal under representation of Indian food in the USA. Where do Americans go for a curry after the pub shuts?