Late last year John Nelson — a UX & Mapping manager at IDV Solutions — published a series of maps that looked at a new way to articulate weather data.

With wildfires raging throughout Colorado and a nasty string of wild weather events hitting the U.S., there couldn't be a better time to check them out once again.

His Excel fix mapped data from a pivot table to a spreadsheet that represented pictorially a pixelated map of the U.S. The result is nothing short of awesome.

We were turned on to Nelson's work after he submitted a timely link about wildfires to the DataIsBeautiful subreddit.

John let us republish some of his maps, so here are four of his coolest charts. Be sure to click to enlarge, the detail is astounding:

1. Wildfires in the contiguous U.S. since 2001

John Nelson / IDV

2. Tornadoes in the contiguous U.S. since 1950

John Nelson / IDV

3. Earthquakes since 1968. Just look at those tectonic plate outlines.

John Nelson / IDV

4. Worldwide hurricanes since 1851. It's a little difficult to read, but just compare it to this map from Nelson showing the same data.

The left-most region of hurricanes hits North and Central America. The empty space down the middle of the left-most bunch is Mexico.

On the right, the bottom right line is made up of typhoons in the Indian ocean. The top right bunch are tropical Pacific cyclones.

John Nelson / IDV

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