Time series Cylinder Plot

While browsing reddit we stumbled upon this post, about a cylinder plot of sea-ice area barrel time series data. We had never seen a cylinder plot like that before and were fascinated by it. Attached to the post was a link to the plots source code and inspired by the plot we decided to use the code and create a cylinder plot ourselves. So here is what we did:

First we needed some interesting time series data for several years. In the past we already made some experience with data from german transmission system operators, so we downloaded the public available vertical grid load data from 50Hertz for the years 2014-2017. Their data has a 15Min resolution which was more than we needed, so we down sampled the data to a daily resolution by taking means.

The code we downloaded makes use of the Processing sketchbook software, which is aimed at creating high level visuals. Changing the code to our needs was a bit tricky because we had no experience with Java so far. And while the data we choose does not have any interesting yearly trends like the sea-ice data we still think the resulting plot looks appealing.