Ever since Hurricane Harvey dumped record amounts of rainfall on us, I’ve been looking for a nice heat map showing what fell where. I could find plenty of source maps — but they were all forecasts made at the time. I couldn’t find something after the fact that showed what actually happened. Late at night, cruising twitter in my bed, I found a tweet by someone at the National Weather Service, retweeting data from a professor at the University of Wisconsin. This led me to contact him and ask if he had more data. Bingo: He recrunched his figures and created a nice heat map that took me a day-and-a-half to retrace in Adobe Illustrator. Amazing data, which our managing editor played huge on page three of the Sunday paper.
Sept. 17, 2017