Visualizing Temperature Data

Olaf Hall-Holt
June 13, 2013

Possible assignment for CVC-type course

  • project from UC Berkeley 'Computing with Data' course
  • task: reproduce a classic plot (NYT, Jan 4, 2004, p. A-15)

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00014g

Getting Temperature Data (Web Scraping)

  • not entirely convenient: different regional offices
  • used Python (BeautifulSoup), scraped from wunderground.com
month day observedLo observedHi normalLo normalHi recordLo recordHi
1 1 1 19 34 8 24 -30 48
2 1 2 11 20 8 24 -36 45
3 1 3 10 29 8 24 -26 46
4 1 4 23 37 8 24 -32 41
5 1 5 24 45 8 24 -28 47
6 1 6 37 46 8 23 -27 49

Then make the plot!

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