Temperature widget

Posted at 11:21 p.m., Oct. 21, 2011

Tags: climate, noaa, temperature and widget

The summer of 2011 was full of discussion of record high temperatures and extreme heat. It turns out high temperature records are broken or at least tied almost every day somewhere in the country, but how many were there today? How can people better understand that number in context?

After discussing that with other members of the graphics staff and climatologists with the National Climatic Data Center, we settled on a group of climate stations to track and a way for people to embed the year's total of records tied or broken on their own sites. (After I left, the NewsHour redesigned its site, and the widget no longer works.) We even revisited this information in other ways to help plan other climate-related coverage; for example, I added an animation/map of temperature records in Texas to a story about the drought in that state.