This is really neat! Every persistent high pressure that the Midwest/East gets this spring and summer is well deserved. On the whole, this has been the warmest winter in Alaskan history; however sea-surface temperature anamolies should allow eastern seaboard to really torch by late spring/summer. I second the question above, how'd you make this exactly?
Now the long answer. In winter, an extreme cold pool of air forms over the Arctic since this part of the world receives little to no energy from the Sun. In addition, the strongest high altitude winds are observed in the cold season. In a typical winter, this 'polar vortex' (or jet stream) traps the cold pool of air near the north pole. However, from time to time, the polar vortex get 'pushed around' enough by atmospheric waves allowing the extreme cold temperatures to move to lower latitudes --- like what happened this year. The result is: while Eastern North America experienced a cold winter, the Arctic was generally quite warm. Hope this helps.
Why is the top of the earth seeing more warming than elsewhere?
Check out this IPython Notebook for the code: http://nbviewer.ipython.org/gist/etpinard/9278679.
First, a two-word answer: polar vortex.
Nice! Have been looking for geo-plotting, one thing I couldn't find on plotly. How did you manage to make this as a scatter chart?
This is really neat! Every persistent high pressure that the Midwest/East gets this spring and summer is well deserved. On the whole, this has been the warmest winter in Alaskan history; however sea-surface temperature anamolies should allow eastern seaboard to really torch by late spring/summer. I second the question above, how'd you make this exactly?
^Thirding the question above. Would love to see the code for this (assuming it was made in R/Python w/ the API).
Yes, it would be really nice to understand how to use plotly to show map/gridded data, the code isn't really clear...
I agree. I'm also looking for mapping options.
Now the long answer. In winter, an extreme cold pool of air forms over the Arctic since this part of the world receives little to no energy from the Sun. In addition, the strongest high altitude winds are observed in the cold season. In a typical winter, this 'polar vortex' (or jet stream) traps the cold pool of air near the north pole. However, from time to time, the polar vortex get 'pushed around' enough by atmospheric waves allowing the extreme cold temperatures to move to lower latitudes --- like what happened this year. The result is: while Eastern North America experienced a cold winter, the Arctic was generally quite warm. Hope this helps.
How come the "z" data isn't shown everywhere when hovering over the image?
Maps are now available! Check out https://plot.ly/python for a bunch of examples :)