Tracking Heat Records in 400 U.S. Cities

feross | 204 points

This is cool, but why not using rigorous statistics?

Block maxima (e.g daily max temperature) follow a generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution.

One can try to see whether this distribution is stationary or not.

Things can get much fancier by e.g. modeling correlations across cities but the above is pretty basic.

A great practical intro is: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4471-3675-0

nextos | 2 years ago

I know it is not my country, and that converting is not that difficult, but personally Fahrenheit degrees are meaningless for me.

henearkr | 2 years ago

Interesting that the site uses ipinfo.io, an analytics service that brags about, among other things "Detect[ing] various methods used to mask a user's true IP address, including VPN detection, proxy detection and more." They appear to even offer a service designed to detect "privacy" users using tor and such.

I'm really curious why the site needs such invasive analytics. It's not by accident - it costs a minimum $1200/year.

KennyBlanken | 2 years ago

Interesting new site here that lets you explore historic temperatures and trends: http://realclimatetools.com/apps/graphing/index.html

anonymousiam | 2 years ago

Nice site. In my case it just confirms that where I'm at (vicinity of Hillsboro Oregon) we've been having an unusually cold and wet spring. Some of the plants are only just now putting on leaves.

I'm sure we'll return to the regularly scheduled inferno soon.

elihu | 2 years ago

The "story" being told doesn't have a clear through line. I didn't understand the context for anything. I also didn't see any of the information I wanted to see.

What was the hottest year? What was the year with the most broken records? What is the overall trend? It actually told me what the hottest day on record was, but there is so much to read I completely glazed over and missed it the first time.

rangewookie | 2 years ago

from the same site: The US has gone $days since a record high temperature

https://pudding.cool/2022/03/weather-map/

nope96 | 2 years ago

I wonder why it’s only record highs and not record lows, too?

I’d be interested to see extremes on both ends.

jader201 | 2 years ago

Meanwhile it’s raining again in Seattle.

vl | 2 years ago

This is pretty! What did you use to visualize the data for 1 day and about 3 weeks of data?

jzer0cool | 2 years ago

Why does this force me to scroll through this like a slideshow?

Anyone else reminded of the bad-old-days when Flash websites were common and broke all UI norms?

butwhywhyoh | 2 years ago

This is a very difficult to navigate site. I wish I had the data presented almost any other way. Which is a shame, because its a cool idea, w/ cool analysis.

You should open source the data.

voz_ | 2 years ago
Proven | 2 years ago

I think this is an interesting project, it does seem to present the information in a rather biased way. I’m not trying to dispute whether things are warmer, but I would like to better understand what the underlying data consists of. I know they have 148 years of data, so I’m curious how that data was collected even 50 to 70 years ago let alone 100 years ago. There has to be a change in the quality of the data collection over time. It would be challenging to fairly compare data from the last 10 or so years to a similar timeframe 100 years ago. I would imagine data doesn’t even exist in some of the cities.

Maybe people who have more expertise in the field or the data collection can chime in.

cc344 | 2 years ago