For NYT Opinion, Sara Chodosh, Zach Levitt and Gus Wezerek have done a great job of visualizing the unprecedented scope of Ukraine’s current refugee crisis compared to other recent exoduses. A series of maps show where Ukrainian refugees are fleeing to, and additional charts show how other refugee crises, by comparison, have evolved over time.

This great interactive from the FT Visual Storytelling Team provides a scrollytelling introduction to the war in Ukraine. Even for those who are unfamiliar with the conflict, this story feels both comprehensive and accessible.

It combines a geographic overview of the conflict—aided by the Mapbox Storytelling Template—with other forms of multimedia, such as charts, videos, and images, to fully show the conflict in context.

Data scientist and geographer Tobias Stalder has made a beautiful 3D visualization of Switzerland’s topography.

The visualization cleverly takes a transect (a word we learned just now) of the country and places effective, informative annotations describing the distinct parts of Switzerland’s topography. Finally, the visualization includes a reference showing the transect’s geographical location, to help the viewer understand the strip in context.

The FT graphics GOAT John Burn-Murdoch has teamed up with Oliver Barnes to give us a deeper dive into the deadliness of COVID-19 following the introduction of vaccines and the Omicron wave. They show, with some particularly well-annotated line charts, that COVID-19 is now less lethal than the seasonal flu (in England, where FT is based).

What’s notable about these charts is the use of annotations; FT reminds the viewer exactly what was happening at each inflection point in the chart, showing why trends evolved the ways they did.

NASA’s aptly-named Scientific Visualization Studio have taken Ed Hawkins’ famous ”climate spiral” and turned it into an animated, 3D visualization. Over the course of a minute, the viewer is shown each year’s global temperature anomaly (from 1880 to present). As the years progress, so too does the size of each circle, representing the increase in temperature anomalies since 1880.

Once the spirals have been drawn, the team uses a clever animation (no spoilers here!) to showcase the rise in anomalies all at once. It’s definitely worth watching until the end.