Climate Central produces high-quality visuals, faster, with Observable

Climate Central creates and publishes rich, interactive maps and graphics that highlight local impacts of climate change. Their visuals are used by journalists and science communicators worldwide in stories that bring climate impacts and solutions closer to home for policymakers and the public.

Climate Central's Climate Matters program produces free weekly climate reporting resources, including local data and custom graphics, for thousands of media partners. Their relatively small team relies on Observable to build, host, and share up-to-date, interactive, local climate data at scale — and on schedule.

We recently spoke with Climate Central's Kaitlyn Trudeau (Senior Research Associate) and Jennifer Brady (Senior Data Analyst and Research Manager), who shared how Observable helps their team build interactive dashboards, maximize their productivity, and expand what they think is possible for their data displays.

Building fast, interactive dashboards that increase data transparency

Climate Central's Climate Matters team works in Observable Notebooks — browser-based, interactive, and editable documents defined by code — to explore climate data, develop interactive graphics, and share them with media partners. For example, they recently published a notebook where viewers can dig into fire weather trends across the United States: 

And, they've embedded graphics directly from notebooks to include them on their website, which is straightforward with notebook embeds: 

But when they needed to create a fast, interactive, multi-page data product where viewers could explore urban heat islands nationwide, they decided to build it using Observable Framework.

Climate Matters chose Framework for their urban heat islands work for several reasons. First, they wanted to build a more polished, multi-page product — in particular, without the many UI elements that make notebooks easy to work in, but also a little busy for non-coding viewers. Second, the census tract and block group level spatial data exceeded notebook attachment limits, which is not a restriction for files-based Framework, where you work and build locally. Lastly, they needed to include fast, beautiful, interactive graphics that allow (and even encourage) viewers to dig deeper into the data. 

Performance and interactivity might seem like nice-to-haves, but they are critical for Climate Central's work and impact. Jennifer explains the importance of fast data displays that let viewers dig deeper: 

Having first prototyped their interactive maps in a notebook, they were able to quickly transfer their work into Framework using the convert command. After customization and fine-tuning, they deployed their app to Observable for no-fuss hosting and sharing. 

Kaitlyn shares the only scary part of deploying to Observable: "...it took no real time at all – it was almost frighteningly simple."

With their app hosted on Observable, they can easily track page views using analytics built into the platform: 

Maximizing productivity without adding complexity

The right tools can help small teams have an outsized impact. Climate Central's Climate Matters is a small team responsible for producing weekly climate reporting resources in both English and Spanish for more than 240 U.S. cities.

Jennifer shared the importance of tools that enable efficient development: 

Both Observable Notebooks and Framework reduce the learning curve for data analysts using interactive tools, and help small teams move faster. With Observable, analysts can quickly access data from databases, local files, or APIs through our friendly user interface (in notebooks), or in Framework's data loaders. Powerful data visualization libraries like D3, Observable Plot, Mosaic vgplot, and deckgl are available out of the box in notebooks and Framework, so users can start building visualizations, faster. And, it's easy to share and securely control access to entire notebooks, feature graphics on other pages as embedded components, or publish final data apps. 

But even once they're published, user-facing interactive graphics and data apps are never actually done. Things break. Changes are requested. They require upkeep. When teams like Climate Central need to keep archives of published visualizations and data apps alive for the long term, maintenance can become a massive burden. 

Jennifer describes how past tools made graphics and app maintenance challenging for a small team: 

In Observable, new team members can jump in quickly to iterate on published Notebooks and hosted Framework data apps.

Expanding what's possible with interactive graphics

Building with Observable doesn't just help Climate Central create and share exactly what they want. It also expands what they think is possible.

Kaitlyn highlights how Observable improves what they can offer their users:

In large part, that better user experience is due to Observable Framework's data loaders and static site architecture, which combine to make rich, interactive graphics load faster when a viewer opens the app. But equally important to expanding what they see as possible are the thousands of stunning, openly available, and easy-to-repurpose data visualizations shared by other Observable creators (see our Trending notebooks collection). This gives the Climate Central team a leg up when developing weekly interactive graphics, offering inspiration for new visuals and helping them avoid building from scratch:

Finally, Observable has expanded what Climate Central's team realizes that they, as analysts and data viz developers, are capable of creating. Kaitlyn shares how building in Observable Notebooks and Framework has leveled up her work, with encouragement for folks curious about getting started: