Your Places: Extreme Weather is a project by The New York Times that helps readers track extreme weather in places they care about. Through this service, readers are able to track the development of severe weather and visualize extreme weather forecasts via an interactive web app and through a personalized email newsletter.

At the time of this writing (Oct 25, 2023), the total number of people receiving personalized email alerts was >250K.

Data processing: I have been working closely with the Bea Malsky, John Keefe, Judson Jones, and the rest of the folks on the NYT Weather Team on this project. In the early stages of the project, I was embedded with the team and contributed to building the data processing pipelines to help make the freely available weather data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Weather Service usable for the onsite interactive and the email newsletter. This involved processing large weather data files and creating workflows to join weather data with cartographic boundaries. Ultimately my work made it possible for us to associate weather with places.

Newsletter: This project was one of the first Graphics team collaborations that put “email first”; The project was built around email delivery as the primary mechanism to alert readers to their weather news. My team was involved from the beginning to design and build every aspect of how to take reader place selections and get that information to them via email. As part of the newsletter development, I worked on everything from building the APIs that would allow us to efficiently store and access the data we needed to create our emails to the components and visual content of the emails.

Interactive: Along with providing maintenance and feature support, I helped early on to build the “place search” component. When the team was building the frontend interactive, we needed a fast and cost efficient way to search for places against our “weather enriched” cartographic boundaries. After some explorations of flatgeobuffer (.fgb) files, I set up the necessary logic that allowed us to pair the results of the Mapbox Search API to efficiently query our weather enriched cartographic boundaries.

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→ See the project on The New York Times | Extreme Weather Maps: Track the Risks for Your Places

Fun note: This was my first NYTimes byline!

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Related

• We received a “Publisher’s Award” (an internal award granted by the publisher of the Times, A.G. Salzburger)
• Nieman Lab | “The New York Times launches a free, geo-targeted extreme weather newsletter”
• NYTCO | “Introducing Your Places: Extreme Weather, A New Geo-Based Newsletter”