ONA issues: Data News, the team working with open data at WNYC, created a number of important open-source tools during Hurricane Sandy, which identified the path of the storm, areas that were affected by flooding, the status of the subway and other modes of public transportation and other issues. John Keefe, Data News editor at WNYC and member of the ONA Board of Directors, showcases the tools they built and how they predicted what the team should focus on to be most useful to those watching the storm.
With hurricane Sandy churning far off the Florida coast, we began anticipating questions people would have around the storm. And then we tried to code answers to those questions as fast as we could.
In order, those questions turned out to be:
Where’s the storm forecast to go? For this, we dusted off our Hurricane Tracker, built for hurricane Irene, and fed it with the National Weather Service data for Sandy. As with almost all of our work, we made it free and easy to embed, and many news outlets did.
What zone am I in? Again, we dusted off something made for Irene — our NYC Evacuation Zone Map. We updated it with better colors and areas newly designated as Zone A. We also published a project I’d been working on since Irene: a Storm Surge Map of the entire New York and New Jersey coastline.
Where’s the storm now? As the storm…
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