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Analyzing 60 years of tornado data with an animation

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By Topics | Analytics Data for Good Data Visualization

With tornadoes in the news lately, I wondered how I might could use SAS to analyze tornado data. How about animating 60 years of tornado path data? ...

I was using Google to search for ways to analyze tornado data, and found an example on ustornadoes.com that animates the tornado path data, by month, for the last ~60 years. I thought it was very enlightening how the tornadoes consistently affected certain areas of the US during certain months of the year. Here's a screen-capture:

I thought "Hey, that's pretty cool! ... Let's try that with SAS!"

So, I dug up my old tornado tracking map from last year, and added just a few lines of code to use the new SAS 9.4 gif animation syntax, and added a 'by month' to my Proc Gmap ... and now I've got the desired animation!

tornado_animation

Tags analytics gif animation tornadoes weather
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About Author

Robert Allison

The Graph Guy!

Robert has worked at SAS for over a quarter century, and his specialty is customizing graphs and maps - adding those little extra touches that help them answer your questions at a glance. His educational background is in Computer Science, and he holds a BS, MS, and PhD from NC State University.

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4 Comments

  1. Grant Sargent on

    Cool animation - Just curious - Is there a reason that there are lots of long lines in the map - do tornados travel hundreds of miles, or do they touch down, then disappear again? (from a land of long white clouds, not tornados)

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