WATER RESERVOIR

View the interactive, scrolling graphic in “WA’s mountain snow recharges our drinking water, powers our lives—now it’s turning to rain,” by Conrad Swanson. Published Sunday, Feb. 4, 2024, in The Seattle Times. This article helped launch the newsroom’s Climate Lab, a group of reporters dedicated to environmental and climate-related stories.

I also created a map of Chester Morse Lake, one of the main reservoirs supplying drinking water to the city of Seattle.

These charts shows how water levels fluctuate within each year, revealing where there were anomalies or record lows.

Process

Here’s some of my preliminary sketches. I rendered the color drafts in Procreate using a pencil-like brush for the linework and watercolor fills. Finally, I created the simple animation (above) in Adobe After Effects.