R:advanced

In my first post of 2024, which unfortunately has not been possible before April, I will explain how we can group in the same location several proportional circles. In 2022 I was looking for how to represent the number of heat wave days according to the degree of severity in Spain. I found the solution using the circle packing which is also used in the Dorling cartogram.

A while back I saw Chris Campbell’s global maps from the Financial Times like in this Tweet and I thought I needed to do it in R. In this first post of 2023 we’ll see how we can access the GFS (Global Forecast System) data and visualize it with {ggplot2}, even though there are several ways, in this case we use the Google Earth Engine API via the {rgee} package for accessing the GFS data. We will select the most recent run and calculate the maximum temperature for the next few days.

A disadvantage of choropleth maps is that they tend to distort the relationship between the true underlying geography and the represented variable. It is because the administrative divisions do not usually coincide with the geographical reality where people live. Besides, large areas appear to have a weight that they do not really have because of sparsely populated regions. To better reflect reality, more realistic population distributions are used, such as land use. With Geographic Information Systems techniques, it is possible to redistribute the variable of interest as a function of a variable with a smaller spatial unit.

In the field of data visualization, the animation of spatial data in its temporal dimension can show fascinating changes and patterns. As a result of one of the last publications in the social networks that I have made, I was asked to make a post about how I created it. Well, here we go to start with an example of data from mainland Spain.

I recently created a visualization of the distribution of river flow directions and also of coastal orientations. Following its publication in social networks, I was asked to make a post about how I did it. Well, here we go to start with an example of rivers, coastal orientation is somewhat more complex.