This is my attempt at a radiation dosage chart in response to a…
This is my attempt at a radiation dosage chart in response to a couple others that have been posted recently.
Randall Munroe of XKCD posted the widely circulated chart below. In it, the relationships within each section are very clear: you can easily see how eating a banana compares to a cross-country flight (two blue boxes vs. 320 blue boxes). However, in order to compare eating a banana to severe radiation poisoning, that relationship isn’t as direct. You must follow the size conversions from blue boxes to green boxes to red boxes since there is no immediate relationship.
(click to enlarge)
David McCandless of Information is Beautiful also created a radiation dosage chart, shown below. Visually it is easier to navigate, as it lists each dosage vertically in sequence. The tradeoff here is that there isn’t an accurate visual relationship between the numbers. There is as much space between .4 microsieverts to 1 microsievert as there is between 50 millisieverts to 100 millisieverts. The color shifts also vary in their relationship to dosage. In the space of .9 microsieverts, the color shifts from yellow to green. A similar shift in color from blue to purple though, spans 90 millisieverts.
(click to enlarge)
In my version (top), the goal was to show a clear relationship between the smallest and largest dosage. In order for that chart to fit on one screen/page, I needed to visualize doses using volume. I also aimed to make the color relationships consistent. To do this I used a gradient from yellow to red and plotted all the points from zero to 8,000 millisieverts. As a result, there is minimal color shift between the smaller doses, and significant jumps between the larger ones. I had to make tradeoffs as well. It was a struggle to find a size that kept all the doses at least somewhat visible while aiming to fit the whole image (or most of it) on one large screen. This affected how the captions were displayed and how many dosage examples I could show.
Notes: All my data was aggregated from David and Randall’s charts, with the addition of the TSA blog. Keep in mind there is some controversy (via DF) about the backscatter emission tests.