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Open Up shares their swift storytelling tips on how to use the Africa Data Hub Climate Observer tool [link] to enhance climate reporting for journalists on the continent by looking at February 2024’s staggering heat and absence of rain. This is a tool designed by OpenUp for Africa Data Hub and was created to help journalists in their researching and reporting of climate change in Africa. The latest version [Link to "press release"] of the tool is available here [Link to CO 2.0]. The guidelines below show how a journalist can use the tool in their everyday reporting using February’s rainfall data as an example. This data is produced by the global precipitation monitoring project, GloH2O. Check it out and apply the principles to your own story using the Climate Observer.
Charting the hottest, driest February on record
Headlines declaring the hottest and/or driest month on record have been a common occurrence over the last year as the cyclical El Niño phenomenon amplifies the ongoing effects of the climate crisis. While African countries have, by and large, not caused the crisis they are disproportionately affected by its impact.
This February is a case in point. Globally, it was the hottest February on record with average temperatures 1.77 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial temperatures. In 2015, world governments agreed to do their best to keep temperature change to below 1.5 degrees this level.
What has this meant in Southern Africa? By some accounts, it was the driest February ever seen. But outside of anecdotes, just how dry was it? That’s where data comes in. The chart below shows data for the region surrounding a town called Ficksburg (the region is called Setsoto Local Municipality) in the Free State, South Africa, where rainfall averaged just 21mm for the month (the South Africa Weather Service has a monitoring station in Ficksburg itself, which recorded just 12mm of rain in the town itself). The same figure for 2007, shown below, was 30mm.
<div class="flourish-embed" data-src="story/2286810"><script src="https://public.flourish.studio/resources/embed.js"></script></div> [CHECK THIS OUT PLEASE!?]
This data therefore shows us that for at least one part of South Africa, February was the driest month on record.
Telling climate stories
It is curious, however, that many news sites have told the story of the dry February without visualising the data in a chart. It’s one thing to hear the story, but it’s another to see just how dry it’s been. To create the chart above, we downloaded data from the Climate Observer [link] for February rainfall in the Ficksburg region over the last 30 years. Ficksburg is the town that we entered as our location of interest and it falls within Setsoto Local Municipality.
We then downloaded the CSV using the button at the top right of the graph, and imported it into the visualisation application Flourish to create a simple column chart. Under the colour settings, we selected a monochrome palette and then highlighted the wettest and driest years with different accents. We chose dark blue for the wettest February on record (2000) at just less than 300mm and we chose red for the driest February on record (this year) at 21mm. These colours make it easier to spot the highest and lowest rainfall data for the audience.
We then used Flourish’s Story feature to add annotations to the chart and to give context to the two months that had been highlighted. We choose to animate the chart and keep it interactive, but a static image would have worked just as well.
All in all, this exercise took about 30 minutes. It’s a simple process that any newsroom or journalist could follow, but it immediately elevates the quality of the story and shows just how dry February has been. These same principles and steps can be applied to any dataset within the Climate Observer from temperature to land cover and to any location of interest. To find out more about the training Africa Data Hub offers to journalists, sign up for our newsletter here.
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