Temperature Radials

A data-forward radial visualization of the historical temperature record of every large city in America. Inspired by Weather Radials.
Created By: Katy Miles, Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider, Angie Cheng, and Karle Flanagan

Introduction

This visualization provides a beautiful radial display of the temperature for every day of each year, across the 1,000 largest cities in the United States, with historical context. You can view any city yourself and, as we explored this data, we found some interesting trends:

Enjoy! :)


Location:
Color Scale:
Year Selection (Tap/Drag the Slider) or Animate All Years

💾 Save as PNG

Summary statistics for :

  • The hottest temperature was
  • The coldest temperature was
  • The average maximum temperature was
  • The average minimumum temperature was
  • There were days that reached 0°F
  • There were days that reached 100°F
  • The widest daily temperature range was
  • The narrowest daily temperature range was

Data Source

This visualization displays a line segment encoding the daily maximum and daily minimum temperature recorded by NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. For the "Temperature" color scale, the color of the line segment encodes the median daily temperature. For the "Difference from Historical Medians" color scale, the color of the line segment encodes the difference between the current year's median daily temperature and the historical median daily temperature.

Historical average temperatures for any given day are found by calculating the average of all the temperatures for that day in the entire dataset. When no line segment is displayed, the data was not reported in the dataset and was not used in calculating the historical average temperature.

The data you are currently viewing was collected from the observation site .


Motivation

This visualization is inspired by the Weather Radials poster series. These posters do an excellent job of visualizing yearly temperature and precipitation data in a beautiful format that makes immense amount of data easily digestible. With our temperature radials, we set out to expand this beautiful temperature visualization to many different locations and years. Each day of the given year is represented as an individual rectangle. As the year progresses, the location of the rectangle moves clockwise along the circle. To interact with the visualization, just hover over a daily rectangle to learn more information about that day's temperature. There are also multiple color scales to choose from.