Weathersquare

Weathersquare is a minimalist, intuitive, and contextual weather visualization platform uniquely designed to provide high-resolution information of past and future conditions at a glance. Each square represents a day or hour, with colors, shapes, and movement mapped to real-time meteorological data. Weather graphics can be too complex or too simplistic. Weathersquare tries to find the sweet spot with a visualization system designed with two main criteria: (1) to show only what matters for everyday use, in an intuitive visual language, but without losing detail, and (2) to show data in temporal or locational context in order to provide experiential references. Weathersquares show cloud cover percentage and sunset-sunrise times (because these affect people’s moods and plans), precipitation probability and rain/snowfall sums, felt temperature, and wind gust speed (but not its direction). This informational and visual minimalism makes it easy to see the relevant parameters for our everyday concerns, in one place instead of separate graphs and modules, and in intuitive visual detail instead of generic illustrations (one big cloud with rain, one wind icon, etc.). Weathersquare strives for simple, friendly, at-a-glance visualization, but it still respects data resolution with continuous scales and representations. Context is also key in Weathersquare. Seeing the past few days/hours within the same system in Weathersquare allows us to get a sense of what’s to come based on our fresh experience of those days/hours (“Today will feel like yesterday, but with a bit more wind”) and to better understand the temporal trends. In addition, we can easily compare the long-term weather and daylight experiences (“atmospheres”) of different cities, or compare the current weather of a city with last year or with decades ago.