Possibly the coolest loading screen I've seen.<p>It would be nice to have a "play" button that automatically goes 1 year back every second or something like that.
Interesting idea, and great visualization. I do think that the timeline controls could be smoother (more refined).<p>Winters are more exciting imo - but there is no way to copy a URI for a specific time :(.
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?
Warning on the site when you visit with an ipad:<p>"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.<p>Your best bet is to bookmark this page, go home, check it out on your desktop, and see it in its full glory."<p>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?
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.
Very cool use of Voronoi tessellation. Did you use D3?<p>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.
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.
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)
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)
Its great - but as far as I can see the north was cold the south was hot until 1990, then the north heated up.<p>I assumed it was much smoother over the century.<p>Ok, we're all boned. Impressive visualisation - what did you use - can you do a post on how you built it?