Statistics with Sasa

Climate change has far reaching impacts beyond the gradual warming of the earth. The ocean is becoming more acidic , coral reefs are dying , and species are going extinct at alarming rates. In particular, extreme weather events appear to be becoming more common in recent years. Evidence suggests that severe floods and droughts have increased  in certain regions of the United States. Anecdotally, just in the past few years, we've seen historic floods in Houston, the worst natural disaster in recorded history to hit Puerto Rico (Hurricane Maria), and devastating wildfires in Australia, just to name a few. I'm going to take a closer look and see if we can empirically show that flooding has gotten worse in frequency and magnitude in the Southern U.S. Interestingly, I found little scientific research on the subject. So basically. You heard it here first. Flooding Down South The Model I obtained data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) for the stream/river networ...

It's been some 45 days since the White House declared COVID-19 a National Emergency and the bulk of us became largely confined to our homes. As people begin to agitate for the end of the quarantine and a number of states begin to open up, I thought I'd offer up a loose collection of data-driven thoughts on the quarantine we've all been experiencing. These insights are based on mobility data measured as Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT). While this is an imperfect metric, we can use the reduction in VMT since before the pandemic as a rough proxy of how effectively we have been adhering to the quarantine. The Quarantine Was Effective, but Effectiveness Varied by State The first observation is that the quarantine was effective, which is probably obvious from a quick glance outside. Average mobility by county fell by approximately 65% when compared to January (the troughs you see are weekends). Some states adhered to the quarantine more seriously than others ...