Which mangroves stand between Vietnam's coast and the next storm?
A data-engineering companion to my VM0033 mangrove-restoration work, using historical tropical cyclone tracks and mangrove extent data to ask: where along Vietnam's coast has storm exposure been highest, and where do mangroves stand between those storms and the shoreline?
What the pipeline surfaces
The BigQuery tables built by this pipeline feed the Mangrove Storm Shield dashboard below — live, not a screenshot. It ranks historical storms by mangrove-hectare exposure within 50km of their track, and ranks Vietnamese coastal provinces by how often a historical storm has passed within 50km. Open it on its own page ↗.
Largest Mangrove Exposure
- Storms ranked by mangrove hectares within 50km of their track.
- Typhoon Joan (1964) tops the list at ~128,864 ha, ahead of Durian (2006) at ~103,355 ha and Linda (1997) at ~81,595 ha.
- Several older, unnamed storms (1950, 1960, 1961) still rank in the top 10 by exposure.
Most Frequently Exposed
- Provinces ranked by count of historical storms within 50km.
- Quang Ninh leads at 114 storms, well ahead of Hai Phong City (77) and Ha Tinh (75).
- The top 10 spans the northern and north-central coast, from Quang Ninh down to Thua Thien-Hue.
Pipeline Notice
IBTrACS here is historical only, not a live feed — swapping in live NOAA data would mean adding a scheduled cloud function instead of a one-off netCDF parse, which hasn't been built. No AWS services were used in this build. Full methodology, data sources, and limitations are documented inside the dashboard itself.