Data

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.

Using this data

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.

Past storms

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.



Snow Plows during the Super Bowl Storm