About the Project & Author
About Tampa Bay Weather
🎓 Student: Junior at New College of Florida ✉️ Contact: j.bloxsom28@ncf.edu 💻 Repository: Behind-the-Scenes Data & Code
The Spark: A Lifelong Fascination with Weather
Ever since I was little, my parents would constantly find me sitting in front of the TV, completely captivated by weather reports. While other kids were watching cartoons, I was drawn to the radar loops, the satellite views, and the meteorologists tracking cold fronts, squall lines, and tropical systems.
That fascination naturally followed me into the classroom. Throughout science classes in late elementary and early middle school, I was always asking why—trying to understand what drove high and low pressure, what created thunderstorms, and how the atmosphere operated. Outside of class, I dove into independent research and study, reading whatever I could find about atmospheric science and meteorology.
When the opportunity came to build this final project as a Junior at New College of Florida, choosing Tampa Bay’s weather was a natural extension of a lifelong passion that started in my childhood living room.
Data & Methods
- Primary Historical Dataset: 10 years (2015–2024) of hourly surface meteorological records from the automated station at Tampa International Airport (KTPA), sourced via NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) Local Climatological Data (LCD).
- Real-Time Data: Live telemetry fetched dynamically from the National Weather Service (NWS) API.
- Technology Stack: Built using R, Quarto, and the tidyverse (
dplyr,ggplot2,patchwork,plotly,leaflet).