As a father of four, I'm concerned that our planet won't be around long enough for them to have grandchildren or their grandchildren to have grandchildren. I've made the decision that the theme for DS21's dashboard week will be on things that:

• May be impacting the environment
• Suffer from the changes to our environment
• Provide evidence that the environment is changing

Because I want DS21 to focus on analytical thinking this week, I'm taking it easy on them with data preparation; we have other means for pushing them to improve data prep.

Gulf of Mexico Water Temperature Observations

For day 1, the team is going to analyze changes in water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. Having gone to university in St. Petersburg, Florida and having taken many holidays on the gulf coast beaches, I'm all too familiar with hurricanes and evacuations. I was wondering, do the water temperatures explain any of this?

The data can be downloaded from ArcGIS Hub. There's a spreadsheet, KML files, and shapefiles available to download.

They have to be done by 3pm for presentations. I'd like them to write a blog post about their process and how they made their findings as well.

Tips

To get the most out of Dashboard Week, here are some tips from former cohorts:

• Planning what your work is way more important than you realize; if you don't plan, you're going to probably suffer.
• You can't be a perfectionist. Don't panic. It'll be ok.
• It's about learning something new and finishing a project in one day.
• Think of it like one of your Friday projects, just repeating every day.
• The focus is on improving and learning to work on a tight deadline.

Remember, the focus this week is on insights. A great design is a bonus. It’s more important to find something that can have an impact.

I wish the team the best of luck this week. I hope what they create can inform and educate people all around the