Man with plan

As I pulled out of the driveway this morning (to park the car on the other side of the street and free up the other car, down at the end of the drive), I had an idea. A rarity, though now I've had two in three days.

What's our drought status? (I thought). How far below normal are we for this time of year? I know where to dig that up in the Times, on the web. But I don't care enough to put that much effort into it.

And then I thought: what about an environmental / climate change dashboard, like the CEOs love so muchso they can swivel in their desk chairs and know at a glance how their company is doing? What if I could plug in a zip code* and see a tricolor summary of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) like precipitation, mean temperature, smog, CO2, rate of farmland consumption, whatever else. And also be able to drill down on the data and change date parameters to map historical change. This would rock. The trick (as always) would be to get good and reliable data and then get traffic to the site. But it would be a terrific consciousness raising tool.

Has anyone seen such a thing?

*Another good front end model would be like Smart Money's Map of the Market (which must be the only thing propping that old rag up).