A recent post on the Junkcharts blog looked at US weather dataand the importance of explaining scales (which in this case went up to 118). Ultimately, it turns out that 118 is the rank of the data compared to the previous 117 years of data (in ascending order, so that 118 is the highest). At the end of the post,

I always like to explore doing away with the unofficial rule that says spatial data must be plotted on maps. Conceptually I’d like to see the following heatmap, where a concentration of red cells at the top of the chart would indicate extraordinarily hot temperatures across the states. I couldn’t make this chart because the NOAA website has this insane interface where I can only grab the rank for one state for one year one at a time. But you get the gist of the concept.

In this spirit…