Tornado and hurricane risk in SC the first five years of each decade of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s

I am no master of spatial joining (yet!), and I will admit that creating these maps is still rather overwhelming for me.  But I am glad to present three maps, each of which tell something of a story about the first half of each decade from the 1970s to the 1990s and the extent to which various counties in South Carolina were susceptible to tornadoes and hurricanes during that period.  I could not figure out how to "lock in" maps in the layout setting, so I did end up having to create new maps and layouts for each of these time periods, but I am at least heartened that they are fairly similar maps.  (The bookmark function was useful, but I did learn that--depending on how "crowded" various areas on maps were--it actually helped not to have the legend in the same place on each map.)

We can see that over the course of the first five years of the 1970s, large swaths of the state were affected by at least one hurricane and that the coastal and midlands areas lived through several hurricanes during this period.  Tornadoes were limited to a few corridors, however, and only 20 were documented in the entire five-year period.

The first five years of the 1980s were a bit calmer on the hurricane front although tornadoes did tick upwards a bit from 20 during the equivalent five-year period in the 1970s to 27 in the same period in the 1980s.

To be honest, I'm not sure why my buffers look different between the 1970s and the 1980s as I thought I had created them in the same way, but perhaps I did something differently.  The 1990s buffers look more like the 1980s ones.

Although the uptick in tornadoes continued in the 1990s, it's interesting that most of them are now in the upstate.

A few notes about things I learned in the process and questions I still have:

  1. Although I did update the populations for each decade based upon the information from the census of the beginning year of each decade, it's hard to see much change in which counties are more or less populated as the years go by (especially as represented by graduated colors based upon quantiles); when moving through these and changing the years in the "Field" category in the Primary Symbology pane, you can see one or two counties--mostly rural ones--getting more populated at various points in time.
  2. I was trying to work across decades, but including all of the hurricanes in a given decade was making the maps unwieldy; the clutter prompted me to work in half-decades.  But half-decades do not tell the whole story, and a single hurricane can change everything.  My half-decades, for example, skipped Hurricane Hugo in 1989, arguably the most consequential hurricane in South Carolina in the 20th century (and certainly in the latter half of the 20th century).
  3. To create the SC-only tornadoes, I selected the features in the broader dataset in which SC was listed in the "st" or state field and exported the features.  (I wanted to practice selecting and exporting features!)  But I'm pretty sure that in using this method, I excluded some tornadoes that started in other states and ended in SC.
  4. For changing titles in the legend, I seemed to need to change the title of the feature class itself, which I found less than helpful as I was sometimes trying to simplify the title just for the legend but would have preferred a more detailed title for the feature class.  What am I missing about titles and legends?

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