The Dashboard Dude

This is my latest Tableau "viz" as I teach myself the software. It's 100 years of weather in eight places in Nova Scotia: Halifax Liverpool Yarmouth Greenwood Halifax Airport Amherst Antigonish Sydney Getting the data for this nearly killed me as it was generally pretty messy and not  really aggregated! I have over 1600 files for 8 places at 100 years each! It was messy except for Sydney and Yarmouth. That was why I had them as separate "vizzes" for Sydney and Yarmouth , each with a longer time range. In doing so, I got to test out the data substitution nature of Tableau for when I need to swap data to make similar vizzes with slightly different data sets, or on a common theme but not desired to be together. The reason for that could very well be to keep things manageable as with the individual place weather vizzes, you never have to worry about the area you're looking at or selecting. You can just focus on the weather. I did Halifax...

The Halifax weather data set was pretty messy, missing lots of little bits of data. However, I still put together a set longer than 100 years that I'll do for other locations because relatively many people in Nova Scotia live here that I didn't want to leave them all out.

Today's Tableau dashboard exercise has weather for Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. The folks keeping weather data there also did a great job over all that time, similar to those in Sydney, Nova Scotia, to have provided a lot of this data from but a few weather stations. Some locations needed not only a lot more, but a lot more a lot more often! Today's exercise for me was mostly to see how easily interchangeable data sets were for doing essentially the same thing in Tableau, but to provide a different product. Sure, it'd be nice to have these two locations, Sydney and Yarmouth, together in one file. However, that'd add an extra dimension to deal with for those who don't care for the other locations. That plus you'd have to cater to either the lowest common number of years for which you have data, or have missing data pop up every now and then. I will be doing a Nova Scotia compilation with 8 locations, but getting enough data for them for 100 years as a nice ...

I've been working hard on a bunch of these weather dashboards for places in Nova Scotia, learning while cobbling together data from Environment Canada that was anything but straightforward and convenient. I'm sure they have their reasons for what they do, though, so I'll stick to using it. Sydney had the most complete data, by far, among the places in Nova Scotia, and for the longest period as well. As a result, I'm posting the weather dashboard for it first. Play around with the sliders, hover over things, click on things, etc . and see what you get. Once you figure out where everything is, make up questions to ask yourself to try and figure out, like what were the hottest 5 years between 1923 and 1976? See if the temperature has been getting warmer? Or just look for things like years where the average daily low was below zero degree Celcius! How many people do you think would have guessed that? Those living there would probably guess it rained and/or snowed...