If you don’t know already, I’m a big fan of Edward Tufte, who is an informational designer. One of his big tenets is the concept of “informational density” — basically the art of cramming as much data into a graph and keeping it readable. Graphics in USA Today are generally the opposite of this, but above is my example. The data that is important to be precise (wind speed and direction) is precise, the other data (humidity, temperature, air pressure) are on there, but normalized to the graph. They are more useful as a trend indicator and less useful in their specifics.

Above is about 12 hours of data. The red dots indicate the instantaneous wind speed reading, the grey filled line is the average wind speed at the reading, the grey dots are the wind direction. Cyan line is pressure, blue line is humidity. Black line with cyan fill is air temperature.

The upper graph includes no smoothing (just the data from Weatherbug) — the lower graph I’ve smoothed the average wind speed to make it less spikey and the temperature and pressure lines to make them less steppy. I’ve kept the direction info and the instantaneous wind speed unsmoothed since they carry more real information.

(Weather data powered by WeatherBug, via their API access.)

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