

Looking for feedback on new Google-finance-style graph-based weather site - jrd79

We just opened the public beta for http://weatherspark.com, taking inspiration from the interactive graphs available on Google Finance. We'd love your feedback on it.<p>The site contains all of the worldwide weather station data available back to 1948 (down to the hour!), and makes it available in an interactive graphing interface. In addition to all the historical data, there are also integrated forecasts from several sources, and detailed records and averages (also down to the hour!) that are shown in the background in order to provide context.<p>The site is intended to serve your daily weather needs, to help inform long-range travel decisions, and to allow geeking out on the raw data.<p>A few cool random views:<p>An average day near the end of July in San Francisco (it is cloudy in the morning, clear in the afternoon, and almost never rains):
http://weatherspark.com/#app;a=USA/CA/San_Francisco;t0=07/23;t1=07/28<p>The monsoon in Mumbai, India (the rain is so dominant that it cools down the air for three months, creating a neat multi-modal yearly temperature curve):
http://weatherspark.com/#app;a=India/Mumbai;t0=01/01;t1=12/31<p>That cold snap in Dallas around the Super Bowl this year that was all over the news (turn on the wind speed and direction graphs and you'll see the wind change from southerly to northerly just as the cold snap starts):
http://weatherspark.com#app;a=USA/TX/Dallas;t=360209;mspp=900000<p>Average late July in Houston (the thunderstorms roll in in the afternoon around 4pm typically):
http://weatherspark.com/#app;a=USA/TX/Houston;t0=07/23;t1=07/28<p>The full year of 2010 in my home town (Madison, WI):
http://weatherspark.com/#app;a=USA/WI/Madison;t0=2010/1/1;t1=2010/12/31<p>Please take a look and explore the data.  Don't forget to pan &#38; zoom, and to turn on other graphs! :)<p>Cheers,
James
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eengstrom
There's such a thing as too much data. I'm looking for information.

I want to be able to set my trip range and make a list of destinations. I want
to be able to set options like "I prefer to travel to Hawaii when there is
less rain". I want to travel to Paris when the weather is between 60 and 70
and never below 55 or above 85 regularly. I want to avoid clouds and rain at
all cost.

The data will turn geeks on, it won't sell to non-geeks. Shoot for
information.

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jrd79
Great point. We are 100% on board with this (in fact, your Hawaii use case is
one of the actual reasons why we started this project)! As a two-man shop we
had to prioritize and decided to create the geek tool first and then start
expanding the tabs to cover more focused use cases like yours.

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eengstrom
Good luck with the project. Remember less is more; especially when handling
copious amounts of data. There's nothing wrong with making a tool that has a
touch span of 45 seconds, provided the user leaves with everything or more
than expected.

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eengstrom
I spent some more time with WeatherSpark this morning, wanted to offer some
thoughts on how this would prove to be very useful for me and others like me.

I would like very much to have a trip or travel plotting function. Origin
point, traffic, wind, weather and a summary for distinct points in the
journey.

For example; departing by car from Richmond, CA at 10:30AM on Saturday and
heading to Healdsburg, CA, remaining 5 hours and returning by the fastest
route.

Departure time, travel time, weather summary along the way combined with
traffic or potential traffic delays. The ability to set how long I will be at
each point and a summary of weather impact at such a location. For me, less
about the data and more about whether I need foul weather gear, extra water in
the car due to delays, or snow chains.

Another example is planning a business trip, or any other kind of trip.
Knowing what to expect within a set range of times is much more useful and
practical than knowing when the best weather conditions MAY be to support
pleasure or optional travel. I do 90% more business travel on demand than I do
pleasure.

Example: departing Richmond, CA to San Francisco International Airport. Depart
on UNITED 3474 to Cleveland, OH on a specific date and time. Travel by car
from Cleveland airport to Wooster, OH, remain for 4 days, return by car to
Cleveland Airport, return on UNITED 6761 flight and time from Cleveland,
through Denver on UNITED 423 to San Francisco, then obviously, the drive home.

Being able to enter or, even better, upload or automatically link to an
itinerary, and understand weather, wind/chill, rain/snow, delays, in a simple
and predictive manner is really helpful. As long as it's fast and incorporates
into the other tools I use for travel planning.

~~~
jrd79
Thank you for the suggestion (and for all your comments)! We really appreciate
the feedback. Travel is a direction that we are very excited about. I've added
your comment to our ticket tracker, so we'll revisit it when we get the travel
features.

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igrekel
Very nice interface! I just have to comment since I've been building for a fee
weather applications in my spare time for a little while. I know what a mess
it can become, especially since you rely on different sources.

I really like how you show the mean and distribution in the background.

I am surprised by the absence of precipitation accumulation, especially since
that is often a valuable information for many people who look at long time
weather.

Also I don't think the horizontal marker adds information since you show the
value for each curve at the cursor, I feel it just clutters the interface.

The meaning of the icons is not always obvious, I am unsure how to interpret
two snowflakes out of three or two raindrops out of four etc. It doesn't seem
to be tied to the PoP. The intensity maybe?

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jacobn
Thanks!

We're working on precipitation accumulation - there are some data fidelity
problems that we're trying to solve, then we'll get that in.

The horizontal marker is intended for comparing across the series - i.e. does
this peak extend further up than this other peak over there. There's a lot of
action going on around the mouse cursor, we'll see if we can pare that down
without losing the key information.

Icons: 1 out of 2 snowflakes etc is the expected intensity of the
precipitation (i.e. light snow, heavy snow, etc). The probability is reported
just next to the intensity in the icon series if you're at a zoom level where
the labels fit.

We don't have a legend for the icons yet, need to add that.

~~~
igrekel
What do you mean by data fidelity, you mean about how to represent the data so
that it is comparable? I can imagine it is a problem especially since your
scale can change. I know I am not showing accumulations graphically for a
number of reasons myself. For a while I was showing snow accumulation on a
graph where it would literally accumulate.

Or something about your data sources? I work with data from Environment Canada
and the only annoying thing with the data was making meaningful unit
conversions when the nature of the accumulation is snow.

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jrd79
Hi, by "data fidelity" we mean that there are a lot of errors and
irregularities in the liquid-equivalent precipitation measurements reported by
the stations. Some stations don't report it at all, or not reliably, and some
report it but with internal inconsistencies. For example, stations may report
in 1-hour, 6-hour, or 12-hour intervals, but they frequently report 1-hour
measurements that don't even come close to adding up to the 6-hour
measurements. We just want to make sure we take some time to understand these
issues with the data feeds before we start publishing them.

The snow depth feed is also a really cool graph. We have it more or less
ready, but it is perhaps the least reliable measurement.

For example, during that recent snow storm in Chicago it reported some pretty
crazy big snow depth numbers for a couple reports and then without correcting
the old reports just dropped the snow depth by more than a meter in the next
report. This is fine if you have a human reading the report, but it makes the
graph look really weird.

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dougmccune
I absolutely love it, but I'm a total data geek. Just as one anecdotal thing
that I got out of the app: 2 weekends ago was ridiculously nice in San
Francisco. If you live in SF it was a weird 2 days of perfect weather in the
midst of an otherwise fairly cold winter. If you look on the charts there it
pops out immediately. There's a huge spike for Feb 5 and 6. Suddenly it jumped
from low 60s/high 50s to a nice 72 degrees and then immediately right back
down again after the weekend. It was really cool to see my personal experience
of the weather quantified like that.

One quick suggestion: show the day of week in the tooltip where you show the
date (when zoomed into showing single days at a time obviously). That would
make it easier for me to relate the data to my memory of the weather.

~~~
jacobn
Thanks - that's exactly the type of observations we're hoping to enable!

Tooltip: Added & deployed, hit reload to get the new app.

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aristus
Very nice. Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.

The interface is daunting, though. I'm not quite sure what it's trying to tell
me.

[http://weatherspark.com/#app;a=USA/CA/San_Francisco;t0=02/16...](http://weatherspark.com/#app;a=USA/CA/San_Francisco;t0=02/16;t1=02/17)

It says 2012 on the bottom bar. I'm uncertain whether this is a bug, a
forecast for 365 days from now, or an average since 1948 or... what, exactly.

I also don't get a feel for the accuracy of the predictions, especially at
what time range. Sure, I can see that in SF winters are wet and summers are
dry, but I knew that already. Can it tell me something interesting about a
shorter period, like late April?

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jacobn
The far future is the averages (light blue background) - the forecast is only
in the "Forecast"-zone (light purple), but perhaps that can be made more clear
(e.g. changing 2012 to "Averages" in the x-axis or something similar).

Accuracy of predictions: the forecasts are as accurate as forecasts are, and
we don't influence that.

The averages (mean, 10th percentile, 90th percentile, etc) aren't accurate in
any predictive sense - they're just the stats for the recorded history for the
station. They tell you what you can reasonably expect, but YMMV.

For SF in late April you can see that the average temperature is steadily
rising and the chance of precipitation steadily declining: 62F high on average
in early April, 65F towards the end. 8% precipitation vs 5% means almost half
as much rain towards the end - I'd hold off until the last week of April if
it's an option ;)

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jterce
Totally geeking out on this at the moment. This is absolutely awesome!! The
only thing I would say is that you might consider adding an additional simple
interface (like a mobile interface) for the less savy viewer. I think the
ability to visualize the forecast is really powerful, I'm just picturing my
mom looking at this and seeing too many options.

Options are great for us data geeks, but a very simple city forecast page that
harnessed your forecast visualization technique could be great for a much
wider audience as well.

~~~
jrd79
Great suggestion! Yes, we are excited to start playing around with ways to
make it more accessible to a wider audience. But we thought it would be fun to
start with the geek tool :).

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slysf
Overall I really like it, I don't know whether it's intentional but for today
in Oakland CA the area to the left of the yellow "now" bar in cloud and
precipitation is blocky columns that don't really tell much. To the right is
the great graph of prediction vs history and I'd expect this to look similar
to the left but reflect actual data instead of prediction.

~~~
jacobn
For precipitation the prediction & averages are in percent, but the past is in
actual hours of precipitation - hence the blockiness for the past (the
vertical axis is from 0-1 hours when zoomed in).

For clouds it's percent cloud cover, so a full block means fully overcast.

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aquark
Wow -- this is great. Canadians love to talk about the weather and this
provides endless conversation topics!

Looking at the recent data for Ottawa, ON there appears to be a glitch on Jan
17, 2011. When zooming in and out the high line jumps up to 19C at some scales
and falls back to normal at others. It wasn't that hot :(

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jrd79
Yes, the raw data feeds have occasional blips like that (more so in some
stations than in others).

It is a top priority to write some good automatic quality control code, but we
didn't want to do a bad job and end up accidentally filtering out real data
(we've discovered, for example, that some of NOAA's quality control filters
have very high rates of incorrectly deleting measurements that are actually
extremely plausible).

We want to take a proper statistical approach, which requires labeling a lot
of examples of these kinds of blips, and we just haven't had time to do that
yet.

~~~
aquark
I'm not sure this is a raw data blip, since it seems to change based on the
zoom level.

19C appears to be the historical high for that day, but is sometimes included
in the band indicating the actual range.

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jrd79
It is definitely a blip. The reason it doesn't appear in all the zoom levels
is that the four-hourly zoom level takes the average temperature of the hourly
data over the four-hour period. Once you go up to the daily zoom level we
switch to showing the high and the low, and you can see the blip again. That
historical high is due to that point.

Actually, I'm just sitting down today to start the process of writing quality
control filters to get rid of this sort of blip. So hopefully it will be gone
soon! :)

