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:
By default, this visualization uses a color scale to show the difference from the historic median temperatures.
Change the "Color Scale" to the median temperature, or energy metrics including heating degree days and cooling degree days.
This visualization uses blue and red dots on the year
selection slider for the coldest and warmest years --
nearly all of the warmest years are most recent and nearly all of the coldest years are historic.
(Check out New York, New York, as an example; Grand Junction, Colorado is a rare counter-example)
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.