New Year’s Project: Temperature Quilt
Many of my art quilts deal with climate and nature, so you won’t be surprised when I tell you that I am making a temperature quilt for New Years! I decided to make a temperature quilt for 2022 based on the daily high temperature where I live. There was one problem - I needed to get 365 days of temperatures and organize them. This year has been really crazy, so I decided to make a temperature quilt in September.
Using some data science and Python programming, I wrote an application to help me construct my temperature quilt. (Tech note: I’m switching from writing code in R to Python, so I joined the amazing PyBites Developer Mindset Program.)
My application requests data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and then organizes the temperature data for a temperature quilt. The program uses your zip code and selected year to find the nearest weather station with a complete set of daily high temperatures. Then, it creates a personalized temperature quilt based on this data.
St. Louis Area, 2021
The app uses a range of 15 colors to indicate the different temperatures. Fifteen colors gives us a sense of the range of temperatures without becoming unmanageable. I tried to split evenly between the warm and cool colors. The color names are from Kona cotton fabrics. The app outputs a table where each day of the year is labeled with a color code.
Color Range
The data is from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). They have weather stations around the U.S. that record daily high and low temperatures, as well as the amount of precipitation (snow and rain). The daily high and low temperatures are recorded using the metric system. A temperature record of -97 corresponds to -9.7 degrees Celsius.
At the end of December, there is an almost complete set of data and the maximum and minimum daily highs for 2022 have already occurred.
If you are planning a temperature quilt for next year, you can use the data from a previous year to estimate the maximum daily high temperatures and then use that to establish ranges for each color.
Colors and Temperature ranges
My app outputs a summary of the daily high temperatures and the corresponding color ranges for the selected year in addition to the table with a record of each day’s color code.
In the pattern, the lowest temperatures are indicated by the color purple. Purple has a label of “0” in the pattern and corresponds to temperature ranges from about 10 degrees to 15.8 degrees Celsius. I have one day (December 23) that recorded this temperature. Overall, my maximum daily high temperatures ranged from about 10 degrees Fahrenheit to a maximum of 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
For the color Tomato, the temperature range is 84.2 degrees to 91.4 degrees Fahrenheit. There were 50 days in 2022 that fell into this temperature range.
Just for fun, I also used my program to get patterns for temperature quilts where I grew up, in addition to the quilt that I will make. Here are three pattern diagrams produced by the programs.
Quilt 1: The area that I grew up in, 1974
Quilt 2: The area that I grew up in, 2022.
Quilt 3: The St. Louis Area, 2022
The maximum daily temperature for the 2022 quilt for 4 degrees higher than 1974! You’ll notice that the 2022 quilts are missing a few days at the end - I’ll need to fill in those values as the days happen!
Birth Year, Birth Location
2022, Birth Place
2022, St. Louis Area
If you want try out the application, here is the link to my streamlit app: Temperature Quilt App . This app works for U.S. zip codes and has a variable date range, since we are dependent on NOAA’s historical data. At the end of the program, you have the option of downloading an automatically generated pdf pattern. Be patient and wait for the pdf download button to appear. Have fun!