Communicating Climate Change Through Sound

May 10, 2018

As part of Data Science for the 21st Century—a new training program at UC Berkeley funded by the National Science Foundation—CNR graduate students Hal Gordon (ARE), Valeri Vasquez (ERG), and Kate Pennington (ARE) were recently challenged to visually communicate their scientific research to a general audience. For a capstone project, the students were partnered with San Francisco public broadcasting station KQED. But they realized that an expression of their chosen science—climate change—would be more appropriately revealed through sound and opted to work with KQED-FM radio. “It was exciting to consider explaining data sets about climate change through a new medium,” said Vasquez, a student in the Energy and Resources Group. “We saw the opportunity to help people pick up nuances in the data that they might not consider when viewing a graph.”