Sunday
A calendar-based data exploration tool. Upload temporal datasets and see them on a timeline.
The Calendar as Canvas
Every country has data that changes over time — temperature, rainfall, parliamentary activity, energy consumption, government spending. But time-series data is almost always presented as line charts or bar graphs. Useful, but not intuitive.
Sunday takes a different approach. The calendar is something everyone already understands. You know where January is. You know what a week looks like. That structure is free cognitive scaffolding — the user spends zero effort on orientation and all their attention on the data.
The default founding dataset is Irish weather from Met Éireann: eighty years of daily observations from synoptic stations across the country. Temperature, rainfall, frost, sunshine hours — rendered as calendar heatmaps where every day is a cell and colour encodes the value.
But the weather is just one starting point. Sunday is dataset-agnostic. Any organisation can set their own foundational dataset — energy consumption, hospital admissions, air quality — and layer additional time-series on top. The calendar stays the same; the data changes.
The vision is a tool where you can see what the temperature was the day you were born, what the Dáil was debating, and how much electricity the country was using — all on the same grid.
A Calendar You Can Paint With Data
Imagine a giant calendar on your wall — not just one year, but fifty years, all stacked up. Now colour each day by how warm or cold it was. Suddenly you can see patterns: which years had harsh winters, which summers were scorching, whether frost is happening less than it used to.
That’s Sunday. A calendar you can paint with data. Start with weather, then add other layers — like what politicians were talking about, or how much energy we were using. You can even upload your own data and see it on the same calendar.
From Data to Calendar
1. Choose a station
Select a weather station from the map or the list. Each station has decades of daily observations — temperature, rainfall, frost days, sunshine hours — sourced from Met Éireann via data.gov.ie.
2. Pick a metric
Choose what to visualise: maximum temperature, minimum temperature, rainfall, sunshine hours, or frost. The calendar heatmap redraws instantly — one cell per day, colour-coded by value.
3. Explore patterns
Scroll through decades. Set thresholds to highlight extremes: show only days below freezing, or only days above 25°C. The frost strip plot provides a secondary view — years on the vertical axis, frost-season months on the horizontal — revealing long-term trends at a glance.
4. Layer additional data
Upload a CSV with a date column and a numeric column. Your data appears on the same calendar grid alongside the weather. Compare energy usage against temperature, or hospital admissions against frost days.
5. Share
Save your view as a link or export the visualisation for reports and presentations.
Time Made Visible
Climate research
Visualise long-term temperature and frost trends across Irish weather stations. Spot patterns that line charts obscure. Eighty years of daily data, rendered as a heatmap, makes gradual shifts immediately visible.
Public engagement
“What was the weather the day you were born?” An entry point that makes decades of meteorological data personally relevant. People explore their own history and discover climate patterns along the way.
Cross-domain analysis
Layer parliamentary sitting days, energy consumption, or hospital admissions onto the same calendar to explore correlations visually. When cold snaps align with A&E spikes, the pattern is visible without statistics.
Organisational dashboards
Any organisation with date-indexed data can deploy Sunday with their own foundational dataset: sales, incidents, usage metrics. The calendar is universal — no training required.
Education
Teach data literacy through a visualisation that requires no explanation. Everyone already knows how to read a calendar. Students upload their own datasets and see patterns immediately.
Under the Bonnet
Visualisation
D3.js calendar heatmap. One cell per day, grouped by week and year. Colour encoding configurable by metric (temperature, rainfall, frost days, sunshine hours). Threshold filtering: all days, below a value, above a value. Frost strip plot as secondary visualisation — years on vertical, frost-season months on horizontal.
Data
Met Éireann daily observations from synoptic stations, sourced via data.gov.ie CKAN API. Integer-encoded and compressed for efficient client-side rendering — eighty years of daily data per station fits in under 200KB. User CSV upload for custom time-series overlay.
Architecture
Django backend, PostgreSQL + PostGIS, D3.js frontend, Tailwind CSS via CDN. Self-hosted PMTiles for geographic components. Part of the derilinx-labs wrapper standard: splash page, Shepherd.js tour, dark/light mode, multilingual stubs.
Status
Preview. Core calendar heatmap and frost strip plot functional with Met Éireann data. Wrapper applied. Known issue: tooltip mouseovers have transparent backgrounds (fix in progress). Future work includes CSV upload, additional dataset integrations, and cross-dataset layering.