2014 Weather Visualizations

There is a great tutorial by Brad Boehmke here on how to build a visualization of temperature in one year compared to a dataset. The infographic is based on one by Tufte

Met Eireann have datasets going back to 1985 on their website here. Some basic data munging on the Met Eireann set for Dublin Airport and I followed the rstats code from the tutorial above to build the graphs below. Wexford would be more interesting for Sun and Kerry for Rain and Wind but those datasets would not download for me.

The first is a comparison of the temperature in 2014 compared to the same date in other years.

Next I looked at average wind speed

And finally the number of hours of sun

These visualizations doesn't look like 2014 was a particularly unusual year for Irish weather. With 30 years of past data if weather was random (which it isn't) at random around 12 days would break the high and low mark for most of these measures. Only the number of sunny days beat this metric. The data met.ie gives contains every day since 1985

maxtp: - Maximum Air Temperature (C)

mintp: - Minimum Air Temperature (C)

rain: - Precipitation Amount (mm)

wdsp: - Mean Wind Speed (knot)

hm: - Highest ten minute mean wind speed (knot)

ddhm: - Mean Wind Direction over 10 minutes at time of highest 10 minute mean (degree)

hg: - Highest Gust (knot)

sun: - Sunshine duration (hours)

dos: - Dept of Snow (cm)

g_rad - Global Radiation (j/cm sq.)

i: - Indicator

Gust might be an interesting one given the storms we had winter 2014. I put big versions of these pictures here, here and here.