Do summer showers actually cool Bangalore?
The short answer is yes, but not in the simplistic way people usually mean it. Rainy afternoons start cooler, end cooler, and still have a proper post-rain drop. The effect changes across April and May.
What this chart is doing
Each day gets a vertical temperature range. The current year sits on top of the normal range and the record range since 1981. Rain is cumulative within each month, because a wet month and a one-day cloudburst are not the same thing.
The subtitle is partly automated, but the analysis is not magic. R computes the weather signals first - streaks, records, rain concentration, warm nights, dry runs. The language layer only decides which of those facts deserves the headline.
Analyses worth keeping around
These are the pieces that came out of staring at the same data for too long. Some are obvious after you see the chart. Some were messier than I expected.
The wind has a cleaner seasonal story than I expected
From December through March, easterlies dominate. By late May, the city has flipped toward westerlies. The southwest monsoon is the cleanest signal in the dataset.
Pre-monsoon rain is an evening creature
April-May rain barely exists before afternoon, then climbs hard into the 5-6pm slot. The southwest monsoon still has an afternoon bump, but it is less fussy about the clock.
Past years
The same chart works backwards. That is the useful part: once the visual grammar is stable, 2021, 2022, or 2025 can be read against the same normals and records.
Question box
Ask the weather question that has been annoying you.
Not an instant chatbot. That is the point. If people ask good questions - did Whitefield get hotter, did October rain move later, do showers cool nights more than afternoons - I can review them in batches and turn the useful ones into new charts.
Google Form coming soon
The form will collect questions for periodic review. No automatic answers, no surprise token bill, and no pretending every question deserves a generated paragraph.
Data and caveats
The site uses hourly weather data for one Bangalore coordinate from 1981 onward. Recent days can shift slightly after late-arriving corrections, so the updater keeps revisiting the last few days instead of treating yesterday's file as sacred.
There is a separate airport-station sanity check for temperature and wind. Rain is the annoying bit: Bangalore showers are local, and the public station feeds I checked do not give a clean rainfall series. So treat the exact millimetres with more caution than the broad pattern.
Daily chart
Generated by bangalore_weather_update.R, then published into docs/.
Data source
Hourly temperature, rain, wind speed, and wind direction for Bangalore.