Water Parks during the Heat Wave
Did visits to El Paso's water parks increase during this summer's historic heat wave?
This past summer was one of the hottest ever in El Paso, with more than forty consecutive days of temperatures higher than 100 degrees . One way El Pasoans tried to beat the heat was by running our air conditioning, leading to record power consumption for the city . Other than staying inside, we wanted to know how else people were trying to stay cool. Specifically, we were interested in how much people were using El Paso's water parks, many of which came on line just in time for this record-breaking summer. We looked at the number of weekly visitors to El Paso's public water parks and spray parks, to see whether the heat wave had an impact. In the chart below, you can see the number of weekly visitors for each park, as well as the average temperature for the week (the shaded area represents the heat wave).
Water Park Visits
Since the heat wave lasted for the majority of summer break for El Paso school students, it is a little difficult to discern the impact of the heat wave on water park visitation. That being said, after the last weekend in June, water visitation decreased every week until the heat wave subsided. Perhaps this indicates that once it's too hot, people would rather stay inside or leave town to beat the heat. Also, we can see that water park visitation increased significantly as the heat wave tapered off in early August. Looking at individual water parks, each had different increases and decreases in visitation throughout the summer, but Oasis and Lost Kingdom water parks most closely match the overall trend.
Data & Methodology
Data on visitors to El Paso's water and spray parks is provided by Near, a private mobility data company that aggregates and anonymizes mobile app data. We imported this data for the dates from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend and for all of the public water and spray parks in El Paso you see in the chart. We took the weekly total of visitors (rather than daily) to smooth out the differences between weekdays and weekends. We imported the temperature data from the Weather Underground website, which uses the temperature reported at El Paso Airport. The dates we considered to the be the 'heat wave' were the forty-four consecutive days of high temperatures greater than 100 degrees Fahrenheit (June 16th - July 29th).