◌  2009 weather data

26 June 2010

Here’s a toy project I’ve had lying around for a few months that might amuse some of you.

I took a bunch of weather data from 2009 – 3,146,644 daily readings from 28,079 weather stations around the world. The datum is not pretty: for one thing, the average station only has readings for 3.1e6/2.8e4 = about 120 days of the year. Some of the readings have obvious errors, which I assume are mostly equipment failure. But there’s enough here to see some patterns:

Each frame of this video shows each station reporting that day as a dot. The dot’s redness is proportional to the mean temperature, its greenness to the wind speed, and its blueness to the rainfall. So, for example, turquoise, being blue and green and not very red, will show up where it’s rainy, windy, and cool. The area between stations is interpolated.

It looks like Britain had a pretty miserable year in 2009, while South and Southeast Asia were mostly warm, dry, and still.