Carbon Brief: Sea ice extent & China glossary
There are certain stories that come up again and again. At the FT these were things like Federal Reserve interest rate announcements, at Carbon Brief we have sea ice extent minima and maxima. Last week we had a record low arctic sea ice maximum (again).
Because these charts are regular and expected I set up a system to get the data and generate them automatically, the graphics can then be embedded in the story via an iframe with minimal involvement from the graphics team. One gotcha is that we don't want old stories to have new charts so instead of generating a single chart we instead create lots of fixed duration charts up to any month in the last few years.
The system runs off GitHub actions and a SvelteKit / D3 project and the resulting SVG charts are hosted on Cloudflare's D2, their S3 object storage equivalent.
A heretofore unnoticed bug this morning meant that the charts were not fully up to date and the story needed to go live. The system had stopped processing new data a couple of days ago. When I found out my heart sank as I thought that our NOAA data source had been turned off by the vandals running the US at the moment. Thank goodness that wasn't the case, a quick fix and I managed to everything back up and running in a couple of minutes.
Also this week we launched a glossary of climate, energy and environment terms in use in China. Decoding how China talks about energy and climate change.
This is the first of several planned glossaries which will all use the same basic template; in addition to giving us with quick place to direct readers to definitions of climate related jargon they also provide a mechanism to embed those definitions directly in articles giving readers what they need where they need it without breaking the flow of the article.