

Global land temperatures since 1900 visualized - poezn
http://halftone.co/projects/temperatures

======
grimtrigger
Possibly the coolest loading screen I've seen.

It would be nice to have a "play" button that automatically goes 1 year back
every second or something like that.

~~~
wicknicks
Good to see your comment. I thought my machine was just too slow.

------
m0hit
Interesting idea, and great visualization. I do think that the timeline
controls could be smoother (more refined).

Winters are more exciting imo - but there is no way to copy a URI for a
specific time :(.

~~~
poezn
You mean something like
[http://halftone.co/projects/temperatures/date/2003/4](http://halftone.co/projects/temperatures/date/2003/4)?
Good idea, thanks!

~~~
damon_c
FYI: I get a 404 on this link.

~~~
agravier
I don't think he was sarcastic, he probably really meant that such shortcut
urls are good ideas and thanks the parent for it.

------
acadien
How about when you click on a spot it pulls up a graph of that particular
location's temperature over time? Maybe add a slider for windowed average to
smooth things out?

------
ako
Warning on the site when you visit with an ipad:

"Hey there. It looks like you're on a mobile device. Just a quick warning:
This project will download a lot of data from the interwebs (no really!), and
even then it probably won't look that great.

Your best bet is to bookmark this page, go home, check it out on your desktop,
and see it in its full glory."

I am at home, on the couch, with an ipad. That is my favorite computing device
at home, I hardly touch my desktop these days... Times are changing... Why
would I want to use a truck at home?

~~~
JesseObrien
>I am at home, on the couch, with an ipad. That is my favorite computing
device at home, I hardly touch my desktop these days... Times are changing...
Why would I want to use a truck at home?

That is the most pretentious load of bullshit I've heard in a long time. The
creators took the liberty to warn you that they might eat into your data plan
that you may be capped on and you call them out? Not to mention the rendering
on this site would bring your little ipad to it's knees. This attitude has got
to go.

~~~
ako
It would have been ok if they hadn't made so many assumptions, telling me to
go home, etc. just saying "this will not work on a phone or tablet" wold have
been much better.

Assumptions they made: * you are not at home, (I am sitting on the couch) *
you have a desktop at home (I have an aging five year old iMac, which I won't
be upgrading any time soon) * a tablet is a mobile device (no, it's mostly
used at home, not on the road)

------
foobarbazqux
This is a naive question, but why is the southern hemisphere so much warmer?

~~~
kaybe
Antarctica is missing, and the equator is not in the middle of the map (more
like 2/3 down). Might this be the reason for your impression?

~~~
foobarbazqux
Yes, it appears symmetric around the equator. Thanks!

------
lkrubner
The northern climes are the ones seeing the most heating. I think you can see
it most clearly for the month of May. Set the month to May and then click
backwards by year through the century, and keep focused on the northern
climbs. You can see them colder as you go backward in time.

------
pvnick
Very cool use of Voronoi tessellation. Did you use D3?

Also, I see you're using data from ground monitoring systems. You're probably
seeing the result of residual heat being let off from surrounding
industrialization over time.

~~~
modulusprime
Not the author.

Yes, it's essentially Backbone & d3 (with topojson for data). And it's a
better intro to "real life Backbone" than todos, so if you're interested, take
a look.

------
solox3
For more reliable comparison of temperatures, the minimum temperature should
be set to zero Kelvin. Otherwise, the colour shown in the visualization is
completely arbitrary, and its intensity cannot be quantitatively described.

~~~
ronaldx
Strongly disagree. 1\. Your chart could be simplified to 'the temperature at
every point on Earth is broadly always the same' \- is this a useful
visualisation? (Perhaps, but surely not at the same level of detail) 2\. In
your chart, what should the maximum temperature be set to?

Since we're talking about temperatures on Earth, it's statistically more
appropriate to use a range which covers just the minimum and maximum
(conceivable) temperatures on Earth.

------
omgmog
Very nice, but it would be even nicer if, when you've changed the month (e.g.
from January to June), and you then go and change the year, it should retain
the selected month (rather than resetting to January)

------
caf
I wish the map was scrollable - the southern hemisphere is mostly obscured on
my laptop's 1366x768 screen.

------
danso
Very cool implementation and pre-loading action...it's almost impossible to
talk about global temperatures without talking about climate change. A view
that I think many people would find interesting is the map colored by
temperature deltas, over a given time...i.e. let the user set start and
beginning and color the map based on the difference (and yes, that will
probably increase hits on your DB, so I'm guessing it may not be trivial to
implement)

~~~
poezn
It's something that we wanted to show too. Apart from the technical complexity
involved it would be hard to show warming. In the last century overall warming
was maybe 1 deg C, but temperatures fluctuate from year to year by up to 15
degrees. Here is a delta graph for 1900 - 2012, for example:
[https://www.evernote.com/shard/s5/sh/6d1d932a-c1ed-411d-9b74...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s5/sh/6d1d932a-c1ed-411d-9b74-867c929b4c49/58f12d843c59aab005bdd6ebd7d5794b/res/a7dbb16d-867f-4885-b34f-8f8d58b1a43e/skitch.png)
One way of doing it though would be to use a rolling average of, say, 5 years.

------
lifeisstillgood
Its great - but as far as I can see the north was cold the south was hot until
1990, then the north heated up.

I assumed it was much smoother over the century.

Ok, we're all boned. Impressive visualisation - what did you use - can you do
a post on how you built it?

~~~
ptvan
Here's the Land vs. Ocean plot in addition to the hemisphere plot.

I'd like to incorporate this bar chart, because I saw some tweets claiming
that this project is evidence that global warming is not real. That annoys me.

[http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/glob/201301-201...](http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/glob/201301-201306.gif)

And yes, we will write a post on what we learned in making it!

