Last week, @MetricMaps put out this awesome animated GIF of average maximum temperatures by day for the United States. The image is a great example of how visualizing time-series can be fun, but also difficult. One of the hardest parts of creating an effective time-series visualization is that the size of the data can get large quick.

So this week I teamed up with my good friend and colleague Chris Helm (@cwhelm) to explore a different way to built a very similar visualization.

In order to build our application we began by whipping up a little script that scraped data from the NLDAS. After some processing of the data we were able to use D3.js to build what we think is a pretty snazzy little example of mapping long term climate data.

You can find the full version with county interaction here. Tell us what you think!