Joel Newman is a Senior Designer at Fat Pencil Studio
How bad was the weather? If you ask me, it gets worse every time I tell the story. Fortunately, we don't have to take my word for it— NOAA (That's the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) maintains a searchable database of past climate and weather data. Recently, we worked on a couple of construction litigation cases involving, at least in part, the abnormal amount of snow, rain, and freezing temperatures that hit the Northwest in the winter of 2016-2017. (If you were in Portland that winter, perhaps you remember the city grinding to a halt for a week as the snow melted and refroze into sheets of ice...)
For each case, we plotted this data on a timeline as a visual indication of the weather: How much snow was on the ground, when did major rainfall occur, or how much did temperatures differ from average. This gives us a digestible and factual context for descriptions of work and conditions on the job sites in question.
In one case, the pace of work was affected by snow lingering on the ground, and the limited daylight hours in December.
The snowfall was particularly disruptive—and particularly unusual, a comparison aided by this visual representation of snow accumulation over the previous several years.
In a separate, but similar case, work was affected by several weather events in the winter of 2016-17: A few days of cold conditions, a week of snow*, and a week of torrential rain. We created a timeline to help viewers recognize these events in the data and compare actual conditions with historic averages.
*If you're from the East Coast or Midwest, please understand, a few inches of snow is a really big deal here in the NW!