Case Study: Climate Dashboard

Euan Ross, a program manager, and Aba-Sah Dadzie, a data analyst, discuss their involvement with the STA Climate Dashboard project. Euan shares his journey in IT, his attraction to the STA's support for tech beginners and advocacy for Tech for Good policies. Aba-Sah explains the dashboard they developed, which provides insights into Scottish greenhouse gas emissions and trends during lockdown. They delve into analysing cycling and pedestrian data, the impact of weather, and visualisations created by Code Clan graduates. Both express their passion for exploration, learning, and the satisfaction of contributing their skills.

View the transcript below:

Hi, I'm Euan Ross, I'm a programme manager. I've worked in IT for over 20 years, starting off as a developer on coding mainframes for y2k. Working way up through business analyst, project manager, and now programme manager.

0:17

Hi, I'm Aba-Sah, I work in data analysis and data science. I got involved in the STA so I could work on data projects that would be able to give back to the third sector.

0:28

The dashboard, the front page is just about trying not to overwhelm people with information at the beginning, introducing them gently to the topic on the main page, we start by introducing the Scottish greenhouse gas emissions, wonderful interactive plot that you can go into the breakdown of all the different elements of each sector.

We've organised it so that it shows the change in emissions between that period of time, the area where the change has been greatest is energy supply. Making sure that we're using megatons of co2 equivalent and pretty standard reference points. So you get to compare like, with like, because once you start getting into the deeper data, it's easy to lose perspective on what is and what isn't. The breakdown we've got here in the sunburst diagram, is completely by sector. And if you click on each one, you then see how that then breaks down to all the different little bits that contribute to the emissions.

1:29

The things we're looking at was the changes in trends over time. And one of the things that you will find, which is quite interesting is how the trends change during the lockdown period. So in general, there is a rise over time in cycling. But what you then see is that there is a sudden rise during lockdown, and especially in May 2020, when there's actually quite good weather. And if you look at the pedestrian data, you can also see the huge surge compared to previous years when lockdown happened.

Taking something that I already did and I knew there are certain things that were happening with cycling, for instance, we had gone from amazing quiet streets and as soon as you got used to them, were insane when they let the drivers back on the road. When locked down lifted, there was a drop in the amount of cycling and also in pedestrians.

Looking at the data and seeing that spike it was like okay, it's not just we're all seeing it, the data is reflecting exactly what we see right there.

And so one of the other things that we looked at as well in the data was how things changed during different days of the week. And what stands out is you get a surge round about the two peak periods, which gives an indication of a fair number of commuters.

So then if you go to 2020, what stands out is the fact that you're no longer seeing that huge surge with commute and traffic. However, what you notice is that you're getting a bit of a flattening. And cycling at the weekends, which is the broken line, you can see tends to be quite different from cycling during the day.

If you look at all the counts over time, and you look specifically at locations, what changes and you can cycle through the years to see how this has changed, where you're getting data from, and how that data is changing.

One of the things we started to look at was what influence does maybe weather have on what is going on. There is the obvious it's a bit colder in January. But it's not just about temperature, sometimes rainfall also has a bit of an impact. So there is a fair bit of information across the data that we have. And this gives you the opportunity to go through it and look at specific areas that are of interest, whether it's time of the day time of the year, and specific locations and so on.

3:57

The graduates of Code Clan have done a variety of different visualisations of the data. This was some work done that was specifically UK wide. That was visualisations and different options that we could show the emissions and different ways of presenting the different sectors with which they were done, and ways of presenting the different constituents with which the emissions are generated. This was the analysis on the Home Energy data. Stephanie did this. This is all of people's properties that have had a survey done as part of either renting it or selling it. That's all been added into the database. This calculation is done on mean energy consumption per metre squared per year. Basically trying to see which houses are the ones that generate the most emissions, and here it is, it's coloured up and you can see, emissions by floor area, separated by council area.

5:07

I think for me, it was like, I love this stuff. And I forget the flexibility of what I can do what I want to do is easy. Whereas I guess some people, it was just where do I start to be confident that it's perfectly fine to fail. And also, for me, it was about exploring.

5:26

One of the things I've seen about with the Code Clan graduates, that I learned, particularly was just what they could do. I didn't know you could possibly do with ar, and all of a sudden, there's these kids disappearing. And now here's the thing. It's been a couple of weeks, whoosh, wow, that's amazing! The presentation, the data, and then you think, oh, did they just take a shortcut, and you look at the code underneath it, and all the cleaning, this had to go on and all the formatting, like, all right, that's quite a bit of work underneath. And there's a lot of skill involved in that. So it's helped me appreciate just the skills that they're bringing to the party as well definitely.

6:01

I had actually hadn't done Potney before, I knew about it, I tried it but I've had to actually learn how to get it to make things work. Because it is the thing of balancing what technology you can use, that wouldn't cost somebody lots of money. And that actually we were wanting to use and it is like.. Okay, that seems to work. And actually I can use it for big projects, which means that I save time. And that's been brilliant, because even though that wasn't the point I can now put on my CV today I can do x and this is how I've used it for this reason. And that's been great.

In so for me it was getting involved in something I wanted to do and then stumbled on this problem is like, right, how did you solve it?

If you're interested in what we're doing, and having other questions that haven't already been answered, get in touch and we'll see what we can do working with you to find answers.