As a bike commuter and with all the snow in the news, I had an itch I had to scratch: How cold has this winter been compared to previous years?

Shown are 3 cities for my home state of California: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. All values are daily low temperature reported at the location.

-Green is this winter season (ok, Autumn too).

-Black and shaded gray are fitted quartiles. Like the min/max values, the discrete view is less than helpful.

-Red and blue are observed min/max over the data period.

Nits: I didn't want to end up with a line plot for non-continuous data, but daily data for the year ends up being too dense for something like points, bars, etc. What points of interest deserve labels without being too cluttered?

data source: Iowa State Mesonet

tools: Python, matplotlib in Jupyter Notebook source