A playful look at a serious subject from Mike Bostock. He uses a small multiple, animated over each year, to show the impact and context of this year’s drought in the US. Click the image to see the animation (it might take a little while to load).
The colour scheme and layout are great here. Being picky, I’d like to see a little more information on the page about the numbers that the colours relate to. It would also be great if you could pause the animation at a particular month.
Better Figures 
That’s quite an impressive achievement, but I find there’s too much information to take in.
Roger Pielke Jr has just done a post on this topic, illustrating it with a simple graph from a US government report.
I agree about the amount of information Paul. I also realise that I missed the obvious red/green issue for some colourblind people. Perhaps a slight tweak would help there?