I'm putting in a new weather station at the house and in the process planning on making some changes to our weather page. In searching the web for graphing ideas I ran across Edward Tufte's Sparklines, which I'd seen before but hadn't had a use for at the time, nor a library to draw them with. Enter sparklines.org and their handy dandy PHP library.

I have a little over a year's worth of our weather data online, probably more stashed away elsewhere. I put together a script to grab the weather and feed it to the sparklines library. Below are graphs from various points in the past to today (6/14/05), the first three depicting our temperature and the last one a nice fuzzy wind speed caterpillar. The green number is the high, red is the low over the period, and blue was the reading at the time I made the graph.

The library doesn't do the "glucose" sparkline yet, as shown on the ET page. Mostly a matter of generating a background strip to depict normal range. A while ago I ran across someone's weather graphs where they graphed the current weather along with the weather from a year back, perhaps further. I'd like to figure out something like that so you can instantly see if this year really is hotter/wetter/windier than the last.

I'd love to hear what your first reaction is to these types of graphs and then what you think after looking at them for a little bit. They are more of a pattern thing, rather than showing what it was on a given date. Also, do you have any favorite (or least fav) graph styles, particularly for weather data? Thanks.

Just for fun here's a slightly different sparkline showing the number of posts made per day since starting this version of my weblog (the homemade version) back in 2001. It used to be that every link I stumbled across became a post. Now they are up in the Latest Links bar (top right) and aren't counted as posts.