Heat Vulnerability App
Custom web app created for the Minnesota Department of Health to highlight the parts of the state that will be most impacted by climate change.
My boss took me to a meeting with the Minnesota Department of Health and promised them we could create a custom web app to understand the distribution of climate vulnerability throughout the state. I was pretty sure putting the datasets together shouldn't be too bad, but I had no idea how to create the web app.
As we walked back to the train after the meeting, I told him sheepishly that I didn't know any JavaScript. "I know" he said. "But you'll learn." I think about that day all the time. About the trust my boss placed in me, and about how he helped me get to the point where I could create the app that the Department of Health wanted.
This project also served as a reminder that for any non-trivial work, there's no such thing as "putting the datasets together shouldn't be too bad." Because of my lack of domain expertise in climate science, I made a significant error in relying too much on a single model, instead of using the mean of a set of models. Fortunately, MDH flagged some suspicious results, and I was able to get advice from the Minnesota State Climatology Office on how to correct the data.