Weather and visual displays of technical information

One of the objectives of our courses in technical communication is to get our students to think about the effective and appropriate visual displays of information. The purpose of the following four weather sites is to give the viewer a snapshot of important weather information. They use visual language (color, images, textual design) as well as textual language to deliver the message to the viewer of the site. Some of the displays use redundancy (they offer the information in both visual and textual form). How effective are these four contrasting displays of weather information for you?

If you need to convert between Celsius and Fahrenheit: http://www.calculateme.com/cTemperature/CelsiusToFahrenheit.htm

Yesterday as I drove to my university office in Mankato, the thermometer in my car read -22 Fahrenheit the entire way. Mankato is located 200 miles north of my home. Today when I awoke at home, the Accuweather (www.accuweather.com) site indicated the following:











By contrast, my next destination, Karlsruhe, Germany, has the following current weather conditions (www.wetter.de):




After that I go to Bengalooru (Bangalore), India where today's weather (www.wunderground.com) is the following:











And finally, on to Jerusalem, where the weather (www.bbc.co.uk/weather) looks like this: