Coming from the retail world, I know that everyone always blames the weather when sales are bad. Sometimes it may be true when people do not go out in the rain or only buy a sweater when it is cold. But we also know that the summer of 2021 was especially hot for many parts of the United States and the world. Luckily the folks at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) provide an API with historical weather data and Domo has a pre-built NOAA connector I can use to pull in data. I do find when pulling for all weather stations the API times out after about 10 days. The data from the API is also quite raw and we had to go find definitions for all the NOAA weather types and station information. Luckily Domo gives me additional tools like Magic ETL that let me enrich the data and store history beyond the 10 days the API will support.
The below maps show the average temperature for June/July/August 2021 compared to the same months in 2020. You can see the hot spots in the Northwest United States as well as Eastern Europe. These types of visuals are great with Domo’s interactive page filters so I can for example click on Idaho in the top map and the rest of the maps will zoom in and I can see details on weather stations or counties. This dataset consists of global data back to 2018 which is over 100 million rows and Domo can handle this scale with ease.