After our meeting with Russ last Thursday, we got a better handle on the kinds of visualizations to focus on. With regards to the goals we mentioned last week, we are moving forward with further data analysis to detect, anomalies and “interesting events” on the sensors. There are a variety of things that need to be flagged for sensor maintenance (such as if a sensor is outputting unreliable data on a day that it rains or if a sensor is not outputting any data) and things that don’t (if a bird flies under the sensor). We began working to parse out events that required Russ’ attention and built a tool he could use to rapidly identify problem sensors. We also intend to begin “interesting event detection”, flagging things like rainfall causing higher water levels in some regions over others.
In terms of visualizations, we completed two complementary plots, one that shows the water level of each sensor and one that shows the max/min/avg water level of each sensor for a particular day. We wanted to create these plots to get a more detailed look into the trends over a long period of time, as well as how the different sensors compare to one another. We will be using these plots in our ongoing data analysis work to cross check whether an anomaly/interesting has truly occurred.
The first plot shows all of the sensors plotted over time with the option to change the time range.
This plot depicts a subset of the sensors. This time the maximum water level for each day is shown from April to June.
By the end of the program, we aim to combine our anomaly/interesting event detection with our visualization capabilities to create a more streamlined way to monitor the Sea Level Sensor network. In this sense, our project has pivoted away from a public facing project to one that can aid people like Dr. Clark in detecting and monitoring events on the coast.
We also met with Dr. Jayma Koval, another collaborator on the Sea Level Sensors project who works more closely with developing curriculum in Chatham county middle schools. She shared with us her insights and feedback on our visualizations, as well as described the curriculum that is being taught.