Radar Weather Chart

Let's dive into a complicated data visualization: a circular chart showing overall weather for the whole year

Project Source Code

Get the project source code below, and follow along with the lesson material.

Download Project Source Code

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Lesson Transcript

  • [00:00 - 02:21] Okay, so we've learned a lot. Great work getting through all of that. Now we're going to go through an example that's way more complicated than the charts we 've been making so far. So we're going to be making this radar weather chart. So the individual parts are this cloud cover band around the outside shows how much cloud cover we got every day. This precipitation band right inside is going to show how much precipitation and also with it was it rain, sleet or snow. We're showing little bars for when the UV index was over 8. We have this radial area chart showing the temperature band so that's min and max temperature. And then we have this annotation in the middle showing what temperatures are below freezing. So it's really complicated. It will definitely take viewers a little bit longer to understand what's going on here but it also gives opportunity to answer more questions and gives you kind of an overall sense of the weather for the year. So the user might be able to answer more specific questions like does cloud cover correlate with precipitation? Are there high UV index days that are also rainy? How do the seasons change overall? How many days were under freezing? So it can answer a lot of questions albeit with a little bit more vague answers than if you had a chart that specifically targeted any one of those questions but it's a nice way to get a sense of overall weather for the entire year. And while we're going through this we're going to be reinforcing the things that we've already known and we're also going to be learning some new things like angular math which come in handy when you're doing a radial chart like this. And I also want to show you pretty much every individualization will have its own problems that you run into when you're trying to make it. So it's kind of nice to have this more complicated example to talk about how to approach new problems as they crop up in your own work. Alright

  • [00:00 - 02:21] Okay, so we've learned a lot. Great work getting through all of that. Now we're going to go through an example that's way more complicated than the charts we 've been making so far. So we're going to be making this radar weather chart. So the individual parts are this cloud cover band around the outside shows how much cloud cover we got every day. This precipitation band right inside is going to show how much precipitation and also with it was it rain, sleet or snow. We're showing little bars for when the UV index was over 8. We have this radial area chart showing the temperature band so that's min and max temperature. And then we have this annotation in the middle showing what temperatures are below freezing. So it's really complicated. It will definitely take viewers a little bit longer to understand what's going on here but it also gives opportunity to answer more questions and gives you kind of an overall sense of the weather for the year. So the user might be able to answer more specific questions like does cloud cover correlate with precipitation? Are there high UV index days that are also rainy? How do the seasons change overall? How many days were under freezing? So it can answer a lot of questions albeit with a little bit more vague answers than if you had a chart that specifically targeted any one of those questions but it's a nice way to get a sense of overall weather for the entire year. And while we're going through this we're going to be reinforcing the things that we've already known and we're also going to be learning some new things like angular math which come in handy when you're doing a radial chart like this. And I also want to show you pretty much every individualization will have its own problems that you run into when you're trying to make it. So it's kind of nice to have this more complicated example to talk about how to approach new problems as they crop up in your own work. Alright