Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Jellyfish and Sunburns

Posted by CavemanForecaster at 1:03 AM
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Sorry for the extended absence of posts, I was on a trip to the beach with the family. Fortunately, no, we did not have any encounters with Jellyfish or Sunburns. But it made me think about Jellyfish and a question I have had in the past:

"When is Jellyfish Season?"

I have looked on the internet in the past and not really found a definitive answer but then recently I thought about Google search data of course. As people have encounters with Jellyfish, they are likely to look up on Google terms like "Jellyfish sting", etc.

So here is a plot showing the past 5 years of search volume for Jellyfish Sting from Google Insights:


Each line is a different year plotted on top of the same timeline so you can see how much seasonal variability there is year to year. Pretty consistent seasonal pattern here with Jellyfish searches peaking in early August. I don't have real Jellyfish sightings or sting data but alot of anecdotal evidence I seem to find on the web does point to a higher Jellyfish incidence rate in late July and August. I may dig on this one more in the future to try to validate this.

And here is a map showing the relative search volume. Of course Florida and Texas with their popular coastlines show up as the highest search volumes. (keep in mind these search volumes are corrected for populations).




What about Sunburn Season?

Thinking about Jellyfish made me think of another beachtime nuisance, sunburns. Sunburns peak in early June rather than late July like Jellyfish do which make me think the Jellyfish seasonality might really be related to Jellyfish occurrences.

But in looking up sunburn, the US and Australia were the top countries with sunburn searches. Here is a cool plot showing the two together over the past 5 years:



The US peaks in June and Australia peaks in January which of course makes sense considering that Australia in the Southern Hemisphere has summer opposite to the US in the Northern Hemisphere.

Any Jellyfish or Sunburn experts please feel free to confirm or dispute my quick Google Search Data analysis.
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3 comments:

  2. I am not a jellyfish or sunburn expert, but it seems to me that sunburns come earlier because people start to spend more time outside and at the pool when it gets warmer and school ends and when their skin is still pale and sensitive. Jellyfish stings are probably dependent on the number of people at the beach (more so than "the number of jellyfish in the water"), which tends to peak later in the summer in the US. I bet the search trends for "beach" line up pretty closely or slightly lead "jellyfish sting."
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  3. Dave,

    Good points. I think this data probably is biased to some degree based on visits to the beach. Data bias is always an important thing to consider when doing a data analysis. I tried finding some beach tourism data to compare but I couldn't find an easy source. But by my experience which is purely anecdotal, the Florida panhandle beaches are totally sold out starting in late May or the 1st of June and actually tail off around early to mid August. But this is something I will try to followup in the future with some more real data to see how it lines up.
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