An interactive visualization of metropolitan area and county population, with changes due to births, deaths, and migration.
Each year the United States Census Bureau provides estimates of the population of geographies. It also produces estimates of change due to natural causes such as birth and deaths, and movement due to migration. These values are provided in two ways: as counts and as rates per thousand state residents.
It is important to note these are estimates, not counts as in the decennial census. In particular, the newly-released estimates for 2020 do not use 2020 census data.
The Bureau’s page for this program is Population and Housing Unit Estimates.
This visualization contains a chart called a box plot, or box-and-whisker plot. The nearby example shows, for each year, the distribution of domestic migration rates, with each dot representing a metropolitan statistical area, in this case. The box for each year shows the interquartile range, which is the range in which half the values appear. The dividing line between the light and dark portions of the box is the mean. The verticle “whiskers” extend to horizontal lines that represent 1.5 times the interquartile range. Anything outside the range of the whickers is commonly called an outlier.
In the second version of the plot, I selected Wichita to be highlighted.
To access this interactive visualization, click here.
For more visualizations, click here.