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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

If the size of each block was reduced to a few pixels square you could fit an entire year in a single image (4 pixels * 12 * 24 = 1152 wide, 365 * 4 = 1460 high) - which might be nice way of visualizing what the weather is like in a location.

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If you were making the blocks that small, I'd make the axis meaningful and go 365 blocks across -- one column for each day of the year -- then midnight to midnight from top to bottom.

This would be a great visualization of daylight quantity and quality over the year.

A similar visualization to what you're talking about is an old project by Lee Byron: http://www.leebyron.com/what/daylight/

Yeah - that's similar to what I had in mind, I don't know if making it bigger would show the effects of weather more.

What those do show is:

- The huge variations in day length due to latitude

- How those of us in higher latitudes spend in the gloaming - my favourite time of day

When I used to work in building design, I used to create lots of charts of various climate data for projects in new regions where I didn't know much about the climate (and also for eye candy in presentations). One of those charts was very similar to what you suggested. Basically a 2D array of coloured squares, with hour of the day along one axis and month of the year along the other. Then each square would be coloured according to the average solar radiation falling at that time of day in that month (using a blue-green-red type scale usually, but you can do grey scale or anything else you can think of). It was a useful way of visualising lots of stuff - variation in day length, strength of the sun, summer/winter variations, etc.

You can plot other variables like this too - temperature, humidity, ...

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