Today project was slightly different, coach Andy had asked us all to find a buddy from outside the cohort to work with throughout the day to see how they approach problems. Sam was kind enough to spend the day answering my questions so many thanks to him for his help!

Todays dataset was from the California fire service. In order to access the data first we web scraped the page to get the api link, then parse out the information, it required a bit of cleaning and then a few calculations to determine things like duration of fire and number of counties involved from the given fields. We also brought in the California county spatial data which allowed us to calculate the area and then normalize the data to remove the bias of the larger counties

Here the alteryx workflow:

Andy has been keen on us trying to tell a story with the data by asking who, what, where and why. There were a few questions that sprung to mind but none of them could really be answered by the data, so I settled on California fires are increasing, but are they getting worse?

The dashboard consisted of a sparkline to show the rise in the number of fires. A map to show the counties worse effected by fires based on burned area compared to the size of the county.

To answer are the fires getting worse I used a bar chart showing either the total or the average burned acres across the years, which showed a  drop in the average burned area across the last 10 years compared to the previous. Another consideration for are the fires getting worse was the duration of the, using a scatter plot you can see that the range of fires is increasing year on year but there are some fires being put out quicker.

Here the dashboard