From January 2012 - January 2019, we've tracked and archived plow activity for 54 snow events in Chicago.
You can download the raw data from past storms here.
We save every GPS observation we scrape from the City of Chicago Plow Tracker. Each observation contains:
We make these points available in a SQLite3 database. The easiest way to work with this data is to run the points through our write_gpx_all.py script to generate a set of GPX files (one for each plow). From there, you can import it into QGIS or write a script to analyze it.
Please note: Sometimes our data feed breaks while collecting plow locations from the City of Chicago Plow Tracker. This means that some of our data has gaps in it for periods of time.
| Date | Snowfall | GPS observations | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 12, 2019 | 4" |
GPX traces
SQLite |
|
| Nov 25-26, 2018 | 9" |
GPX traces
SQLite |
|
| Feb 17, 2018 | 2" |
GPX traces
SQLite |
|
| Feb 8-11, 2018 | 14.3" |
GPX traces
SQLite |
|
| Feb 3-7, 2018 | 4" |
GPX traces
SQLite |
|
| Jan 14-16, 2018 | 3-7" |
GPX traces
SQLite |
|
| Dec 28-29, 2017 | 3" |
GPX traces
SQLite |
|
| Dec 9-11, 2017 | 2" |
GPX traces
SQLite |
|
| Nov 9-11, 2017 | <1" |
GPX traces
SQLite |
|
| Mar 12-14, 2017 | 4" |
GPX traces
SQLite |
|
| Dec 10-13, 2016 | 3" |
GPX traces
SQLite |
|
| Jan 9, 2016 | 1.7" |
GPX traces
SQLite |
|
| Jan 4, 2016 | Trace |
GPX traces
SQLite |
|
| Dec 30, 2015 | 1" |
GPX traces
SQLite |
|
| Dec 28, 2015 | 2" |
GPX traces
SQLite |
|
| Dec 2, 2015 | 1" |
GPX traces
SQLite |
|
| Nov 20-22, 2015 | 4-12" |
GPX traces
SQLite |
|
| Mar 23, 2015 | 5" |
GPX traces
SQLite |
|
| Feb 25-26, 2015 | 5.7" | SQLite | |
| Jan 31 - Feb 8, 2015 | 19.3" | SQLite | This was Chicago's 5th largest snow storm on record. Plows were tracked for 9 days and we collected 1.94 million GPS observations of Chicago snow plows. Missing data from 10pm Feb 2nd to 8am Feb 3rd. |
| Jan 26, 2015 | 1.0" | SQLite | |
| Jan 25, 2015 | 1.0" | SQLite | |
| Jan 11-12, 2015 | 3.0" | SQLite | |
| Jan 8, 2015 | 3.0" | SQLite | |
| Jan 5, 2015 | 1.8" | SQLite | |
| Jan 4, 2015 | 2.2" | SQLite | |
| Mar 12, 2014 | 3.2" | SQLite | |
| Mar 1-5, 2014 | 3.7" | SQLite | Missing first 18 hours of data |
| Feb 17, 2014 | 5" | SQLite | Missing last 10 hours of data |
| Feb 8, 2014 | 2.5" | SQLite | |
| Feb 4-5, 2014 | 7.1" | SQLite | |
| Jan 31 - Feb 2, 2014 | 4" | SQLite | |
| Jan 24-26, 2014 | 2.8" | SQLite | |
| Jan 21-23, 2014 | 3.1" | SQLite | |
| Jan 18, 2014 | 2.4" | SQLite | Missing first 8 hours of data |
| Jan 4-10, 2014 | 12" | SQLite | Missing data from Jan 7-8 due to unforseen City data feed changes |
| Dec 25, 2013 | 1.2" | SQLite | |
| Dec 22, 2013 | 2" | SQLite | |
| Dec 17, 2013 | 1" | SQLite | |
| Dec 16, 2013 | 2" | SQLite | |
| Dec 13-14, 2013 | 4.2" | SQLite | |
| Dec 10-11, 2013 | 0.9" | SQLite | |
| Dec 8, 2013 | 3.1" | SQLite | |
| Mar 5, 2013 | 9.2" | SQLite | |
| Feb 26-27, 2013 | 1" | SQLite | |
| Feb 22, 2013 | 1.9" | SQLite | |
| Feb 7, 2013 | 1.4" | ||
| Feb 4, 2013 | 2.4" | SQLite | |
| Feb 2, 2013 | 1.8" | SQLite | |
| Jan 25-28, 2013 | 1.1" | SQLite | |
| Dec 20, 2012 | 0.3" | SQLite | |
| Feb 10, 2012 | 1.5" | ||
| Jan 21, 2012 (part 2) | |||
| Jan 21, 2012 (part 1) | 9" | Split in to two Fusion Tables. |
