Investigating Dengue in Taiwan

GLOBE: Access and Graphing

Instructions on accessing GLOBE Science Data Visualization for precipitation data:

1. Go to https://vis.globe.gov/GLOBE/

2. At the top middle of the page, click on Data Counts to select a date range (the icon and text
should be white). Because our investigation will be covering the years 2015-2018, you will enter
2015-01-01 to 2019-01-01.

2. Locate these icons near the top left of the screen and click the first one. You should see a
dropdown menu titled Protocol Layers.

3. Select Atmosphere. In the menu that opens, select Precipitation.

Check the box next to Rain Depth. Click Submit.

4. Now, click on the second icon near the top left of the screen. You should see a menu
titled Filters. Select Find Multiple Sites: and then By School or Schools.

Type in each of the following schools:

Uncheck the box next to Display Site Locations.

Click Submit.

5. There should now be four red circles on your map. Zoom into Taiwan. Click on each circle to
open the site information window. Take a few minutes to explore the available data for each
school with your group.
 Investigating Dengue in Taiwan
GLOBE: Access and Graphing

6. Now you will prepare the data for download.

For each site:

- From the site information window, select the
Measurements tab.
- Click on the table icon next to the Atmosphere
title.
- Select Precipitation Data and click View.

- All of your data is displayed in the table that popped up. Right click on any column header to
open a window which will allow you to filter the data columns. Uncheck all of the boxes except
School Name, Measured At, and Vis Rain Depth. On the bottom right, change the data range to
2015-01-01 to 2018-12-31.

Now your table should look like this. Click Export .csv on the bottom left of the window and
choose to Save File when your browser asks.

- Repeat these steps to download the data for each site. You should have 4 .csv files when
you’re done.
 Investigating Dengue in Taiwan
GLOBE: Access and Graphing

7. Open up the files. We want to put the data from the North sites together in one spreadsheet,
and the data from the South sites together in another.

North: Select and copy the three columns of data (School Name, Measured At, Vis Rain Depth)
from the Wu-Ling Senior High School spreadsheet and paste it underneath the corresponding
columns in the Dan-Feng Senior High School spreadsheet. Rename this spreadsheet “North
Taiwan data”.

South: Select and copy the three columns of data from the Feng-Shan senior high school
spreadsheet and paste it under the corresponding columns in the KaoHsiung Girl’s Senior High
School spreadsheet. Rename this spreadsheet “South Taiwan data”.

For each new spreadsheet (2):

- Right click on Column B (Measured At) and click Format Cells.
- Choose Custom underneath Category.
- Type in mm/yyyy in the space under Type:
- Click OK

- With Column B still selected, switch to the Data tab in Excel. Click the icon to Sort the
measurement dates from Oldest to Newest. A Sort Warning window will pop up. Select Expand
the selection. Now the two schools’ data should be mixed together and sorted by date (instead
of one school’s data on top of the other).
- Remember to complete these steps for both the North Taiwan and South Taiwan
spreadsheets.

Graphing Instructions:
The year you will be making graphs for (North & South) depends on which group you are in
(Group 1: 2015, Group 2: 2016, Group 3: 2017, Group 4: 2018).

Select all the data for your year and click Line with Markers under the line graph options.
Double click on the line connecting the data points to bring up the Format Data Series sidebar.
Choose “No line.”
(Why are we doing this? Ideally, we want to visualize our data using a scatterplot, but you can only set
even units when you make a scatterplot in Excel. We want our units to be Months, which have different
numbers of days (uneven). This way, we are modifying our line graph to look like a scatterplot and are still
able to keep the units as Months.)
 Investigating Dengue in Taiwan
GLOBE: Access and Graphing

- Horizontal axis: Change the minimum value to 1/1 and the maximum value to 12/31 if they’re
not set already.
- Add major vertical gridlines to visualize monthly data better.
- Add a title and label the axes appropriately.