I recently got my hands on some temperature data from points all across Kansas and by playing around with it for a minute found it had a story to tell:

The data was measured from multiple sites across Kansas over the last 20 plus years. This chart is the average hourly temperature across all the sites over that period (it’s about 3.2 million readings total) Finally I added a trend line so you could easily see the long term average change in temperature.

Living here, it’s hard to notice in the short term, some years are hotter, some are cooler…naturally. However, when you take the averages over such a large amount of data it really smooths out that variability, making it pretty easy to see that the ‘center’ of the readings have moved from the low 50’s to high 50’s in these last 20 years or so.

Trended and Visualized Temperature Data. Kansas: Jan 1995 – May 2017