Have released a Microsoft Power BI based interactive dashboard that supports interactive analyses of Historical Daily High & Low Temps for some select North American observation stations.
The sites cover a wide range of regions throughout North America, and in many cases, go pretty far back (in some cases into the 1800’s). Data was sourced from the US National Weather Service, and included Canadian sites (the Canadian data was originally from Environment Canada). This dashboard nicely highlights many of Power BI’s best features, particularly the ability to drive queries and calculations based on user selections (achieved by using DAX measures).
There are two tabs, one for Degrees Celsius, and another for Degrees Fahrenheit (selected by clicking on the ‘1 0f 2’ string in the middle of the lower frame, or the adjacent arrows).
When users select a single Site, Month, and Year, the High and Low Temps are plotted on the chart. Additionally, calculations and visualization are presented, relevant to that month.
Please note that some locations were sourced from ob site that moved within a city, and in some cases the data overlaps. In those cases button will be displayed to allow the user to chose between the sites (and in some cases this needs to happen to prevent double counting).
Sites can then be switched to see how nearby sites differ – this helps with confirmation of data quality, and helps reveal extent of synoptic weather pattern changes, particularly for heat waves/cold snaps. Month-over-month, and year-over-year swings also jump out well, giving the user insights to past seasons people experienced.
This analysis shows August, 1918, for London, Ontario, which included out highest recorded air temperature: 41C / 106F. That’s before any sort of humidity index, though one can deduce that would have been extreme, as the Low Temperature on the 6th was 20C and a whopping 26C on the 7th. As the Dewpoint cannot go below the Temperature, that serves as a poxy for how humid it was during that period. VERY humid!!
Edit: I have built another dashboard that illustrates the power of using DAX Measures to drive calculations that respond to user selections on the fly – titled ‘Summary‘. This Dashboard summarizes the total number of days that exceed various temperature thresholds (shown in both F & C). This set of visualizations supports choosing multiple months, in any combination, or the whole year (by having no months selected). All the calculations and visualizations respond to the selections and automatically recalculate based on the number of days in the selected period. The selection of months are maintained when choosing another Year or Site, making comparisons easy and effective.
Click on image to launch the Dashboard. Enjoy!!
Here is a sample of the ‘Seasonal Summary’ Dashboard (it also launches the Dashboard):
