Temperature Radials
A data-forward radial visualization of the historical temperature record of every large city in America. Inspired by Weather Radials.
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:
- 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 observation data from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. Details about the location of the observation site the data is from is found below the visualization.
Enjoy! :)
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 .