With the limited water capacity in my well, I have to depend mostly on rainfall for growing crops in my farm. Farmers have a rich traditional knowledge about the rainfall patterns, but I am very new to following the weather patterns and wanted to improve my intution. To start with I wanted to visualize the historical daily rainfall over a few decades and internalize the seasonal rainfall pattern over my farm.
I began with searching for a good visualization scheme for seasonal variations and Spiral plots seemed to be a good option. I mucked around with installing and trying to use R, but it seemed to require a bit more of initial time investment to learn it proper before I could understand what I was doing.
Then I came across Observable which is written by the authors of D3.js. I already knew about D3.js as a good framework and decided to do my visualization with Observable. With a quick signup using my Google account I was able to play around using the large number of examples. I also found a spiral heatmap visualization notebook that I was able to clone and adapt to presenting my data.
Here is the result of the visualization showing rainfall over Tindivanam from January 2000 to February 2023. Rainfall data was taken from Open-Meteo
In 2024, I have created another take on this visualization using the Observable Framework.
Edits
- 2023-12-07: Updated rainfall data up to Dec 2023
- 2023-04-17: Shortened the title of this post