Meteorological summer started yesterday and it felt a bit colder than normal with a high of 70℉ degrees where the normal high is 75℉. Not a huge difference, but I can feel the cool 50s on my morning bike ride to daycare drop off. The rest of the month looks like it’s going to be cooler as well. Even though May felt colder than normal, the data suggests that it was actually warmer than normal.
It’s not easy to find this information online, you have to know where to look or always be paying attention to what the meteorologist are talking about. That’s why I’m working on an app that will display the normal highs, lows, record highs and record lows for the any given date as well some weather information from the month. I started with this idea because I’m fascinated by the always changing weather and climate. I want to know what’s normal when it feels really hot or really cold for a given time of the year. Normal or at least how many times in history has the temperature been this high or low.
Some of the questions I want to answer with the new website and app are:
- What’s the normal high or low for today?
- What’s top ten record highs or lows for today?
- How does this month compare to historical months?
- How much snow or precipitation have we gotten compared to average?
Even though that app is not done there are still a lot of data points that I’m interested in seeing now. Below are a few of the temperature visualizations that I will eventually add into the app as I get more time. With the help of xmACIS2 and everviz I manually built the following data visualizations as a recap of what the temperature was like this past May here in Minneapolis.
Average high temperature in May
This chart displays the average high temperature in Minneapolis, Minnesota for the entire month of May from 1873-2022. The data reflects the high temperature from every day in May and then averages that out over thirty one days. Looking back you can see which year’s had really hot months of May and which had really cold ones. Looking at the chart it looks like 1934 had the hottest May with an average high temperature of 90.5F with 2006 and 2018 coming in a close second.
May’s highs compared to normal
In this visualization I’m showing May 2022’s recorded highs temperatures compare to the normal temperature for that day. The chart shows the roller coaster of weather that came through this past May. We started off really cold with a slight warm up before dipping back down to a cold stretch before finally warming up to end out the month.