Interpolating Climate Data

When you look at a weather map, it shows nice wavy areas with temperatures bands.  This makes it seem that there are weather stations everywhere collecting and sharing data, but that's not how it really works.  There's only a small sample of stations; some other magic is needed to produce the temperature distribution.

To get to full coverage, ESRI provides an interpolation tool that does the trick, taking the sample set and predicting temperatures across a continuous zone.