Visualizing Ecuador's earthquake with Studio

Matthew Whittemore
Mon, 18 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0400

In the aftermath of one of the strongest earthquakes in Ecuador’s history, I’ve been using the dataset editor to visualize data from the United States Geological Survey to better understand the scope and intensity of the earthquake.

My main source of data was the real time USGS GeoJSON earthquake feed. This feed provides a feature collection of points indicating the epicenters of recent earthquakes. From this data, I was able to retrieve intensity readings for each survey center that detected the earthquake. Loading this data into the dataset editor, I then created polygons representing the different intensity zones.

At this point the data was still too hard to read, so I made a dataset of hexagons covering the affected area. Each hexagon was then correlated to the highest intensity zone the hexagon covered from my first pass at the data. The result is what you see below.

Our data team is closely monitoring Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s response to determine our activation level.

Stay tuned for updates about the dataset editor and feel free to send me questions about it on Twitter @mcwhittemore.