10 ms·

Show HN: A world map of 24x365 average temperature “fingerprints”

347 points by jacobn 5y ago

NelsonMinar 5y ago
Congratulations on the new thing! I've loved Weatherspark ever since y'all were doing very innovative presentation back in 2013 or so. One suggestion; have you tried re-centering Southern hemisphere calendars so summer is still in the middle? The "red dot in the middle" is such a clear pattern, no reason you couldn't have it in Australia too.
- jacobn 5y ago
  We've talked about it, but so far no, it messes with the x-axis a little too much (averages, history, compare, everything needs to work & line up across both time & northern/southern hemisphere, and what graph has two x-axes anyway!? ;) and while neat it's a little marginal from a substantive utility perspective?
- gmurphy 5y ago
  Double agree with this suggestion - as I've split my life between hemispheres, weatherspark has been enormously useful for explaining relative climates to new and old friends, but I always have to edit the comparison graphs myself to put summer in the middle before sharing so you can actually compare the differences.
  - jacobn 5y ago
    Hmm... maybe for just the compare pages then? I'll chat with James about it to see what we can do. (I'm one of the site creators)
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    Same here. Funny enough they seem to have done the adjustment for the similar cities feature (“far-away foreign places with temperatures most similar”) but when you click to compare them the charts are all unadjusted.
    - dzhiurgis 5y ago
      Same. I want to move from Auckland, NZ to Azores and it's not super clear whats the climate like (tho comparing some other charts seems Azores wins).
- Smoosh 5y ago
  I was going to make this suggestion too. While we are making suggestions, here's two more: * pop-up with location name when hovering over a fingerprint. * adjust colours in temperature scale to personal taste. And/or adjust temperature range in each category (my freezing cold may be another person's chilly).
  - rhn_mk1 5y ago
    Absolutely. What happened to all the below-0 degrees of cold? -2°C is mushy, -10° is crispy, and then it gets very cold. It's important! EDIT: now I see the last interval is just very large: -9°C to 0°C. Something around -5°C would work better, as this is roughly where the physical properties of the world change, because road salt stops working.
xahrepap 5y ago
This reminds me of “Temperature Blankets”. They seem pretty well known in knitting/crocheting world. Typically they’ll do a row or two of a color representing the weather for each day of the year. My wife made one for the year 2020. It’s really neat looking at it and seeing how the weather fluctuated in and out the days and weeks. I think it would be so cool to have several for different important/notable years… but they can be so much work!
- jacobn 5y ago
  The closest thing we have for specific years is this: https://weatherspark.com/h/y/557/2020/Historical-Weather-during-2020-in-San-Francisco-California-United-States#Figures-ColorTemperature https://weatherspark.com/h/y/557/2020/Historical-Weather-dur... It’s not available on the world map, but you can drill down to any year in any location we have data for.
- detaro 5y ago
  A variant on that: A German woman did a scarf with lines showing how much her commuter train was delayed: https://www.dw.com/en/german-train-delay-scarf-sells-for-thousands-at-auction/a-47080140 https://www.dw.com/en/german-train-delay-scarf-sells-for-tho...
vlovich123 5y ago
Would it be possible to animate this over time to visualize the impact of global warming?
- yosito 5y ago
  You wouldn't be able to visualize the impact of global warming with this data/representation. Global warming is roughly 1 degree celcius over the past couple hundred years, as a global average. This visualization only shows temperatures in 6 degree increments in specific locations. The historical data in many locations probably isn't even enough to capture that 1 degree average change, and there would be so much noise from "random" variations in local climates that there would be no way to accurately draw any conclusions from such a visual representation. If you want to see visualizations of the impact of global warming, I'd recommend the visualizations based on research-backed models on https://picturing.climatecentral.org/ https://picturing.climatecentral.org/
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    Neat, but those visualizations seem like an unrealistic exaggeration for dramatic effect. I would assume that people would generally respond in some way to large scale flooding as they've done in the past, whether building levies or creating artificial land & rebuilding on top to try to stem the problem. Certainly an expensive endeavor that'll continue to create drastic inequalities across the globe & it'll create a lot of humanitarian crises, but it would genuinely surprise me that 10 years from now Google Earth images will actually look similar to these predictions even if we don't change our path. I think the better way to message this is "here's the cost of what it'll cost your government to keep this city running over the next 10 years/here's how much money you'll lose if you don't start getting ready".
    - yosito 5y ago
      > it would genuinely surprise me that 10 years from now Google Earth images will actually look similar to these predictions The interface says that these are predictions of sea level rise several centuries from now.
foota 5y ago
This is a really neat site! I've always wanted a feature that would show me areas with similar weather to a certain location (or allow me to draw my own graph to find).
dzhiurgis 5y ago
You probably already know this, but crossing international time line stops rendering fingerprints on one side and starts rendering on another - can't seem to have both on screen. Also - any chance to have this as a table? i.e. so you can find places with bestest weather? So far looking at map Sidi Ifni Airport stands out for some strange reason. Finally the range at 18-24 degrees should be potentially more finely grained. The difference of 6 degrees is huge.
jerryluc 5y ago
This reminds me of an art installation at the university in Trondheim, Norway. It's using a glass ball as a lens to burn holes in a tin plate. Every year the tin plate is changed and displayed on the wall inside the university. https://www.trondheim.no/en/art/art-in-public-spaces/art-sun-project https://www.trondheim.no/en/art/art-in-public-spaces/art-sun...
- nielsbot 5y ago
  There's a similar work in San Francisco: A solar totem by Charles Sowers https://www.sfartscommission.org/our-role-impact/press-room/press-release/new-public-art-glen-park https://www.sfartscommission.org/our-role-impact/press-room/...
- mrsuprawsm 5y ago
  Cool! Are there any pictures available of the tin plate after the year is completed?
  - matsemann 5y ago
    They are hanging on the walls of Realfagsbygget ("STEM-building") at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Best picture I could find: https://koro.no/content/uploads/2020/04/55-417x550.jpg https://koro.no/content/uploads/2020/04/55-417x550.jpg (some of them not burned yet) From the end of the long album here: https://koro.no/prosjekter/ntnu-trondheim-norges-teknisk-naturvitenskapelig-universitet-realfagbygget-campus-gl%C3%B8shaugen/ https://koro.no/prosjekter/ntnu-trondheim-norges-teknisk-nat... My favorite art installation in that building is a huge Foucault pendulum. Always had to wait for it to knock over a peg when walking past.
max_ 5y ago
This creator seems to have other interesting projects under his "Cedar Lake Ventures" [0]. They are really worth checking out as I find some of them very useful. [0]: https://cedarlakeventures.com/ https://cedarlakeventures.com/
philmcp 5y ago
Cool project! Would be interesting to see a metric on "average temperature change since 1960" to see which places have been hit hardest by climate change Saying the planet has increased in temperature by 1.5 degree doesn't mean much - but if a city has increased in temperature by 5 degrees, I think that makes it feel much more "real"
- AlanSE 5y ago
  I'm starting to develop a laundry list of problems that I perceive with the presentation of climate change science. People keep giving the temperature anomaly, as if there was something fundamental about the baseline temperature. This is kind of nuts, from a simple layman perspective. Tell me what the temperature was before and tell me the temperature after. I also wonder if the US would have taken action by now if the numbers had been presented in Fahrenheit. Living in the US, I'm totally fine with Celsius... for science. I'm not okay with it for evaluating comfort. I have no idea how a Celsius temperature feels. My lizard brain knows Fahrenheit. 1.5 degree increase doesn't really sound bad. 2.7 does. These climate blankets would be crazy useful for climate change. Show the complete decimation of comfortable temperatures (mainly in the tropics), and the point will be much better taken.
crancher 5y ago
The density and type of ads masks well presented information. I don't see the ads but am left unwilling to share links to the site where I sure would otherwise.
- pininja 5y ago
  I agree, without reading your comment I thought the map fingerprints were linking to a tabloid weather report. I went back and realized the pages have very well developed interactive data visualizations.
- jacobn 5y ago
  Yeah, the ads are a double-edged sword. We've been running this site for... ten years? And for the longest time it languished with some Google Adsense ads on there, making enough to keep the servers running, but not enough to invest more effort in it. Then we recently switched ad provider, and the site grew a bit as covid started easing up, revenue doubled with the potential for more, and boom it's worth it to invest in it again. I don't like the ads. I'd rather offer the site without them. But without them the site wouldn't be up - I'd have to turn off the servers, and there wouldn't be a map of temperature fingerprints at all. I really wish there were a better solution. But so far there just isn't. At least we don't do anti-ad-block ;) (I'm one of the site creators)
  - tenuousemphasis 5y ago
    A developing alternative to advertisements is micropayments using HTTP 402 status and Bitcoin over the Lightning network. https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    I'm curious. What do the hosting costs & tech stack looks like? I'm assuming you're mostly just serving some static content & some server costs to generate the images periodically? Is there anything else?
    - 5y ago
dom96 5y ago
This is a really awesome visualisation. Really shows at a glance the climate of each location.
lifthrasiir 5y ago
Nitpick: Changing the temperature unit does not automatically update the help modal (elsewhere is fine); it seems that a particular language is always associated with a particular unit.
- jacobn 5y ago
  Ah, fixed, thanks!
mutagen 5y ago
I miss the old WeatherSpark visualization of past conditions and the future forecast. They had a wonderful graph of various weather parameters in a nice slippy zoom interface that made it easy to visualize the forecast. It was built in Flash and they decided that a HTML version wasn't viable due to declining ad revenue. Some appreciation and screenshots of the old version: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sad-day-weatherspark-dashboard-dead-nick-mashburn-p-e-/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sad-day-weatherspark-dashboar... https://flowingdata.com/2011/03/14/weatherspark-for-more-graphs-about-the-weather-than-you-will-ever-need/ https://flowingdata.com/2011/03/14/weatherspark-for-more-gra... https://www.reddit.com/r/weather/comments/4hkbq4/rest_in_peace_weatherspark/ https://www.reddit.com/r/weather/comments/4hkbq4/rest_in_pea... https://www.glerl.noaa.gov/pubs/fulltext/2016/20160004.pdf https://www.glerl.noaa.gov/pubs/fulltext/2016/20160004.pdf - The interface was even noted in a NOAA paper.
- jacobn 5y ago
  Yeah, those were good times indeed. I try not to think too much about just how many hours/days/weeks/months I spent writing creatively cached Flash graph drawing to get the silky smooth pan & zoom behavior the dashboard offered. But while lord Google is amazing at indexing SEOd text content, they aren't (weren't?) very good at feeding traffic to a tool with effectively no text. How could they know it was a good way to view the forecast for San Francisco without having a dedicated weathespark.com/forecast/san_francisco page with a decent amount of text along the lines of "forecast", "ten day forecast", "temperature", "precipitation", "rain", etc? We did try to do something like that but Google never picked it up - while many people loved the dashboard, as a fraction of overall forecast consumers it was probably quite tiny, so I can't say I blame them ;)
  - floatrock 5y ago
    Searching for any recipe shows the same paperclip-maximizing-gone-amok do-not-want SEO trap: I don't care about some made-up story about how this ratatouille makes you think of summers at grandma's garden. That's all empty word-calories best left for the writers at pixar. Something truly revolutionary would be if google ranked recipe sites by higher recipe-to-fluff ratios. Thanks for developing all the stuff at weatherspark. It's one of my favorite practical examples of compact visualization done right.
NKosmatos 5y ago
Wow! Such a great site and very good visualization of weather data in easy to read plots/graphs.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dylan604 5y ago
It's sad that official weather reports are centered around airports. I understand why it was easy to choose. Their locations tend to not represent the area of interest to most individuals. Lots of wide open spaces, no trees, etc. Seems like there could be a mobetta way of doing a centralized "official" way, but alas, it is what it is. I do like the sites that gather/present data on a more granular level from interested parties installing weather gear like local schools, libraries, weather-nerds, etc.
Bologo 5y ago
It's okay but this real-time map of the weather anywhere in the world is more useful I think, with a nicer interface too: https://www.ventusky.com/ https://www.ventusky.com/
jazzyjackson 5y ago
nice! I might like to apply this to a geodesic sphere, could be arbitrarily divisible, images could fill the faces instead of floating above the map in boxes.
yesenadam 5y ago
This is so awesome, thank you! I've got friends in quite a few countries, and this in 20 minutes has told me more about what it's like where they live than I learned in the previous 10 years.
buildbuildbuild 5y ago
So many ads.
- Ettaa 5y ago
  one needs to make money somehow ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
krisrm 5y ago
This is really neat, but I feel like it wasn't quite designed with the red-green color blind demographic in mind ;)
OOvsuOO 5y ago
This is awesome! I can compare climates of my home to others in the world and see weather patterns all over. It's mind blowing. All though a visual medium rather than auditory (text is based on sound), which would be impossible to do the same. Or a lot harder. I think it's impressive.
knolan 5y ago
These are almost like flags. Especially so you could select the colourmap based on the countries national flag.
d--b 5y ago
I think that it would be much more readable if they inverted the x and y axes...
mrsuprawsm 5y ago
I like the way that this site lets you compare "pleasantness" of climates, e.g. humidity + temperature etc year round. This makes me wonder, where in the world has the objectively "best" climate? Comfortable or warm all year round, not too humid, not too windy, lots of sun.
- nfc 5y ago
  I'm gonna advocate Tenerife (my island) since it would be amazing to have more HNers around :) https://weatherspark.com/y/147639/Average-Weather-at-Tenerife-South-Airport-Spain-Year-Round https://weatherspark.com/y/147639/Average-Weather-at-Tenerif... Doesn't seem to get much better according to weatherspark :)
  - AlanSE 5y ago
    It's like Hawaii, but after adding back in some "cool" temperatures. https://weatherspark.com/y/145050/Average-Weather-at-Hilo-International-Airport-Hawaii-United-States-Year-Round https://weatherspark.com/y/145050/Average-Weather-at-Hilo-In...
sails 5y ago
Very cool. Reiterate other's comments that mouse-over a fingerprint showing a hover would be great. When clicking a fingerprint, the next page should prominently show the fingerprint, burying it in the page, especially when it isn't obviously a long scroll page, made it hard to find. Please consider inverting "Spring" etc for Southern Hemisphere, as currently it has a _very_ Northern centric view of the world. Thanks!
- jacobn 5y ago
  Spring in NYC is Mar-May: https://weatherspark.com/s/23912/0/Average-Spring-Weather-in-New-York-City-New-York-United-States https://weatherspark.com/s/23912/0/Average-Spring-Weather-in... Spring in Sydney is Sep-Nov: https://weatherspark.com/s/144544/0/Average-Spring-Weather-in-Sydney-Australia https://weatherspark.com/s/144544/0/Average-Spring-Weather-i... But maybe you meant something else?
  - sails 5y ago
    Yes I meant when comparing, per below, Sydney is 20-30 degrees celcius in "Winter". Not sure why that view defaults with the seasonal labels. https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/0/23912~149466/Comparison-of-the-Average-Spring-Weather-in-New-York-City-and-Sydney-International-Airport https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/0/23912~149466/Comparison... This second link gives a better view https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/23912~149466/Comparison-of-the-Average-Weather-in-New-York-City-and-Sydney-International-Airport https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/23912~149466/Comparison-o...
    - jacobn 5y ago
      Ah, we use the first location's view of the world, so [0] does Mar-May, and [1] does Sep-Nov [0]: https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/0/23912~149466/Comparison-of-the-Average-Spring-Weather-in-New-York-City-and-Sydney-International-Airport https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/0/23912~149466/Comparison... [1]: https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/0/149466~23912/Comparison-of-the-Average-Spring-Weather-at-Sydney-International-Airport-and-New-York-City https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/0/149466~23912/Comparison... We've added double-x-axis for comparisons to the todo-list.
joeberon 5y ago
Please add celcius to the scale EDIT: it can be changed at the top right
- mFixman 5y ago
  I can only see data on Celcius. Maybe it depends on your location?
  - joeberon 5y ago
    I'm in Germany
foota 5y ago
It's a little weird looking at e.g., Central Africa and seeing no maps. Maybe they chose locations based on population? Either way, would be nice to fix this, as there are places with data available.
- jacobn 5y ago
  We show temperature fingerprints for all the weather stations in our network, you can find links to the data sources here: https://weatherspark.com/y/147186/Average-Weather-at-John-F.-Kennedy-International-Airport-New-York-United-States-Year-Round#Sections-Sources https://weatherspark.com/y/147186/Average-Weather-at-John-F....
  - foota 5y ago
    I think something is missing here, this[1] is a zoomed in image of Africa, there are clearly stations in DRC and Angola, but no snapshots show there. https://imgur.com/a/KmkVoUJ https://imgur.com/a/KmkVoUJ
bluenose69 5y ago
From the point of view of someone living in northern North America, this is quite warmth-biased, with * temperatures below "very cold" being called "freezing" (huh? mere freezing is not considered terribly cold in much of North America, where "very cold" would likely restricted for T < -20C or so) * "comfortable" extending into times of year when the heat and humidity bothers most locals * the favourable tourist times being centred on warm periods, in contrast to the actually favoured period of autumn, with warm days and crisp nights, the trees a marvel of colour.
- dwd 5y ago
  Their tourism score for Queensland, Australia is completely back-to-front. The climate is tropical/sub-tropical so peak tourism season is winter when it's warm, clear skies and no rain. Summertime is storm season: muggy, cloudy and heavy rain. Summer is also stinger season so you can't swim north of Cairns without head-to-toe covering due to the box jellyfish risk.
- jwalton 5y ago
  “Comfortable” is not only a function of temperature, but also relative humidity and wind speed. Based on this site, there are no good times to visit Hawaii - it’s always too warm to be comfortable, even in the middle of the night. I assure you this is not the case. ;) It is a “temperature fingerprint”, and not a comfort fingerprint, but maybe “neutral” would be a better word here.
- jrd79 5y ago
  I was the one who devised those labels and it was hard to come up with the words to describe the temperature ranges (we also report the raw temperature range for each category, so you can remap the words as you please). I did my best, looking at a variety of sources and relying on my own experience, having lived in a variety of climates myself. The one that I was quite confident would be widely agreed upon was "freezing", since it has such a literal meaning of a temperature where water freezes. But as with all things weather, its complicated. Personal preference, clothing choices, activities, all contribute. But we hope the fingerprints are nevertheless and informative and interesting way to explore the average weather!
sega_sai 5y ago
It'd be cool to be able to show the most similar fingerprints for any location. I.e. I want to see which locations have similar climate to city X.
- jacobn 5y ago
  On each annual report page, at the bottom of the Temperature section, just before the "Compare X to another city" section there's a paragraph that for NYC reads: "Gedzhukh, Russia (5,672 miles away) and Yatsuomachi-higashikumisaka, Japan (6,752 miles) are the far-away foreign places with temperatures most similar to New York City (view comparison)." - it's a little hard to find, but there's a lot of info competing for attention, not to mention the ads :-/ https://weatherspark.com/y/23912/Average-Weather-in-New-York-City-New-York-United-States-Year-Round#Figures-ColorTemperature https://weatherspark.com/y/23912/Average-Weather-in-New-York... is the closest to a direct link
0xTJ 5y ago
I makes me a bit sad that I've moved from Ottawa to Toronto, cutting my time in the "freezing" from 3 months to half that. Seeing a 3D stacking over the years (maybe a moving average) would be interesting, to see how much things have warmed since I was a kid. Overall, that's a neat page!
nwatab 5y ago
looks very interesting! helps me to compare my current location and the next destination to travel.
FR10 5y ago
Great visualization. Just a heads up, it seems that the cloud coverage is backwards at least in Lima. The cloudy months IRL are exactly the opposite of what the graph suggests.
wjan 5y ago
Let me plug my personal project, which is similar to what's presented here: http://weathernomad.com http://weathernomad.com
marto1 5y ago
It's really amazing how much information is there for each location. Does anyone know more about how long was this info gathered and how ?

347 points by jacobn 5y ago

Congratulations on the new thing! I've loved Weatherspark ever since y'all were doing very innovative presentation back in 2013 or so. One suggestion; have you tried re-centering Southern hemisphere calendars so summer is still in the middle? The "red dot in the middle" is such a clear pattern, no reason you couldn't have it in Australia too.

jacobn 5y ago
We've talked about it, but so far no, it messes with the x-axis a little too much (averages, history, compare, everything needs to work & line up across both time & northern/southern hemisphere, and what graph has two x-axes anyway!? ;) and while neat it's a little marginal from a substantive utility perspective?
gmurphy 5y ago
Double agree with this suggestion - as I've split my life between hemispheres, weatherspark has been enormously useful for explaining relative climates to new and old friends, but I always have to edit the comparison graphs myself to put summer in the middle before sharing so you can actually compare the differences.
- jacobn 5y ago
  Hmm... maybe for just the compare pages then? I'll chat with James about it to see what we can do. (I'm one of the site creators)
- tshaddox 5y ago
  Same here. Funny enough they seem to have done the adjustment for the similar cities feature (“far-away foreign places with temperatures most similar”) but when you click to compare them the charts are all unadjusted.
  - dzhiurgis 5y ago
    Same. I want to move from Auckland, NZ to Azores and it's not super clear whats the climate like (tho comparing some other charts seems Azores wins).
Smoosh 5y ago
I was going to make this suggestion too. While we are making suggestions, here's two more: * pop-up with location name when hovering over a fingerprint. * adjust colours in temperature scale to personal taste. And/or adjust temperature range in each category (my freezing cold may be another person's chilly).
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  Absolutely. What happened to all the below-0 degrees of cold? -2°C is mushy, -10° is crispy, and then it gets very cold. It's important! EDIT: now I see the last interval is just very large: -9°C to 0°C. Something around -5°C would work better, as this is roughly where the physical properties of the world change, because road salt stops working.

xahrepap 5y ago

This reminds me of “Temperature Blankets”. They seem pretty well known in knitting/crocheting world. Typically they’ll do a row or two of a color representing the weather for each day of the year. My wife made one for the year 2020. It’s really neat looking at it and seeing how the weather fluctuated in and out the days and weeks. I think it would be so cool to have several for different important/notable years… but they can be so much work!

jacobn 5y ago
The closest thing we have for specific years is this: https://weatherspark.com/h/y/557/2020/Historical-Weather-during-2020-in-San-Francisco-California-United-States#Figures-ColorTemperature https://weatherspark.com/h/y/557/2020/Historical-Weather-dur... It’s not available on the world map, but you can drill down to any year in any location we have data for.
detaro 5y ago
A variant on that: A German woman did a scarf with lines showing how much her commuter train was delayed: https://www.dw.com/en/german-train-delay-scarf-sells-for-thousands-at-auction/a-47080140 https://www.dw.com/en/german-train-delay-scarf-sells-for-tho...

vlovich123 5y ago

Would it be possible to animate this over time to visualize the impact of global warming?

yosito 5y ago
You wouldn't be able to visualize the impact of global warming with this data/representation. Global warming is roughly 1 degree celcius over the past couple hundred years, as a global average. This visualization only shows temperatures in 6 degree increments in specific locations. The historical data in many locations probably isn't even enough to capture that 1 degree average change, and there would be so much noise from "random" variations in local climates that there would be no way to accurately draw any conclusions from such a visual representation. If you want to see visualizations of the impact of global warming, I'd recommend the visualizations based on research-backed models on https://picturing.climatecentral.org/ https://picturing.climatecentral.org/
- vlovich123 5y ago
  Neat, but those visualizations seem like an unrealistic exaggeration for dramatic effect. I would assume that people would generally respond in some way to large scale flooding as they've done in the past, whether building levies or creating artificial land & rebuilding on top to try to stem the problem. Certainly an expensive endeavor that'll continue to create drastic inequalities across the globe & it'll create a lot of humanitarian crises, but it would genuinely surprise me that 10 years from now Google Earth images will actually look similar to these predictions even if we don't change our path. I think the better way to message this is "here's the cost of what it'll cost your government to keep this city running over the next 10 years/here's how much money you'll lose if you don't start getting ready".
  - yosito 5y ago
    > it would genuinely surprise me that 10 years from now Google Earth images will actually look similar to these predictions The interface says that these are predictions of sea level rise several centuries from now.

foota 5y ago

This is a really neat site! I've always wanted a feature that would show me areas with similar weather to a certain location (or allow me to draw my own graph to find).

dzhiurgis 5y ago

You probably already know this, but crossing international time line stops rendering fingerprints on one side and starts rendering on another - can't seem to have both on screen. Also - any chance to have this as a table? i.e. so you can find places with bestest weather? So far looking at map Sidi Ifni Airport stands out for some strange reason. Finally the range at 18-24 degrees should be potentially more finely grained. The difference of 6 degrees is huge.

jerryluc 5y ago

This reminds me of an art installation at the university in Trondheim, Norway. It's using a glass ball as a lens to burn holes in a tin plate. Every year the tin plate is changed and displayed on the wall inside the university. https://www.trondheim.no/en/art/art-in-public-spaces/art-sun-project https://www.trondheim.no/en/art/art-in-public-spaces/art-sun...

nielsbot 5y ago
There's a similar work in San Francisco: A solar totem by Charles Sowers https://www.sfartscommission.org/our-role-impact/press-room/press-release/new-public-art-glen-park https://www.sfartscommission.org/our-role-impact/press-room/...
mrsuprawsm 5y ago
Cool! Are there any pictures available of the tin plate after the year is completed?
- matsemann 5y ago
  They are hanging on the walls of Realfagsbygget ("STEM-building") at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Best picture I could find: https://koro.no/content/uploads/2020/04/55-417x550.jpg https://koro.no/content/uploads/2020/04/55-417x550.jpg (some of them not burned yet) From the end of the long album here: https://koro.no/prosjekter/ntnu-trondheim-norges-teknisk-naturvitenskapelig-universitet-realfagbygget-campus-gl%C3%B8shaugen/ https://koro.no/prosjekter/ntnu-trondheim-norges-teknisk-nat... My favorite art installation in that building is a huge Foucault pendulum. Always had to wait for it to knock over a peg when walking past.

max_ 5y ago

This creator seems to have other interesting projects under his "Cedar Lake Ventures" [0]. They are really worth checking out as I find some of them very useful. [0]: https://cedarlakeventures.com/ https://cedarlakeventures.com/

philmcp 5y ago

Cool project! Would be interesting to see a metric on "average temperature change since 1960" to see which places have been hit hardest by climate change Saying the planet has increased in temperature by 1.5 degree doesn't mean much - but if a city has increased in temperature by 5 degrees, I think that makes it feel much more "real"

AlanSE 5y ago
I'm starting to develop a laundry list of problems that I perceive with the presentation of climate change science. People keep giving the temperature anomaly, as if there was something fundamental about the baseline temperature. This is kind of nuts, from a simple layman perspective. Tell me what the temperature was before and tell me the temperature after. I also wonder if the US would have taken action by now if the numbers had been presented in Fahrenheit. Living in the US, I'm totally fine with Celsius... for science. I'm not okay with it for evaluating comfort. I have no idea how a Celsius temperature feels. My lizard brain knows Fahrenheit. 1.5 degree increase doesn't really sound bad. 2.7 does. These climate blankets would be crazy useful for climate change. Show the complete decimation of comfortable temperatures (mainly in the tropics), and the point will be much better taken.

crancher 5y ago

The density and type of ads masks well presented information. I don't see the ads but am left unwilling to share links to the site where I sure would otherwise.

pininja 5y ago
I agree, without reading your comment I thought the map fingerprints were linking to a tabloid weather report. I went back and realized the pages have very well developed interactive data visualizations.
jacobn 5y ago
Yeah, the ads are a double-edged sword. We've been running this site for... ten years? And for the longest time it languished with some Google Adsense ads on there, making enough to keep the servers running, but not enough to invest more effort in it. Then we recently switched ad provider, and the site grew a bit as covid started easing up, revenue doubled with the potential for more, and boom it's worth it to invest in it again. I don't like the ads. I'd rather offer the site without them. But without them the site wouldn't be up - I'd have to turn off the servers, and there wouldn't be a map of temperature fingerprints at all. I really wish there were a better solution. But so far there just isn't. At least we don't do anti-ad-block ;) (I'm one of the site creators)
- tenuousemphasis 5y ago
  A developing alternative to advertisements is micropayments using HTTP 402 status and Bitcoin over the Lightning network. https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture
- vlovich123 5y ago
  I'm curious. What do the hosting costs & tech stack looks like? I'm assuming you're mostly just serving some static content & some server costs to generate the images periodically? Is there anything else?
  - 5y ago

dom96 5y ago

This is a really awesome visualisation. Really shows at a glance the climate of each location.

lifthrasiir 5y ago

Nitpick: Changing the temperature unit does not automatically update the help modal (elsewhere is fine); it seems that a particular language is always associated with a particular unit.

jacobn 5y ago
Ah, fixed, thanks!

mutagen 5y ago

I miss the old WeatherSpark visualization of past conditions and the future forecast. They had a wonderful graph of various weather parameters in a nice slippy zoom interface that made it easy to visualize the forecast. It was built in Flash and they decided that a HTML version wasn't viable due to declining ad revenue. Some appreciation and screenshots of the old version: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sad-day-weatherspark-dashboard-dead-nick-mashburn-p-e-/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sad-day-weatherspark-dashboar... https://flowingdata.com/2011/03/14/weatherspark-for-more-graphs-about-the-weather-than-you-will-ever-need/ https://flowingdata.com/2011/03/14/weatherspark-for-more-gra... https://www.reddit.com/r/weather/comments/4hkbq4/rest_in_peace_weatherspark/ https://www.reddit.com/r/weather/comments/4hkbq4/rest_in_pea... https://www.glerl.noaa.gov/pubs/fulltext/2016/20160004.pdf https://www.glerl.noaa.gov/pubs/fulltext/2016/20160004.pdf - The interface was even noted in a NOAA paper.

jacobn 5y ago
Yeah, those were good times indeed. I try not to think too much about just how many hours/days/weeks/months I spent writing creatively cached Flash graph drawing to get the silky smooth pan & zoom behavior the dashboard offered. But while lord Google is amazing at indexing SEOd text content, they aren't (weren't?) very good at feeding traffic to a tool with effectively no text. How could they know it was a good way to view the forecast for San Francisco without having a dedicated weathespark.com/forecast/san_francisco page with a decent amount of text along the lines of "forecast", "ten day forecast", "temperature", "precipitation", "rain", etc? We did try to do something like that but Google never picked it up - while many people loved the dashboard, as a fraction of overall forecast consumers it was probably quite tiny, so I can't say I blame them ;)
- floatrock 5y ago
  Searching for any recipe shows the same paperclip-maximizing-gone-amok do-not-want SEO trap: I don't care about some made-up story about how this ratatouille makes you think of summers at grandma's garden. That's all empty word-calories best left for the writers at pixar. Something truly revolutionary would be if google ranked recipe sites by higher recipe-to-fluff ratios. Thanks for developing all the stuff at weatherspark. It's one of my favorite practical examples of compact visualization done right.

NKosmatos 5y ago

Wow! Such a great site and very good visualization of weather data in easy to read plots/graphs.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dylan604 5y ago

It's sad that official weather reports are centered around airports. I understand why it was easy to choose. Their locations tend to not represent the area of interest to most individuals. Lots of wide open spaces, no trees, etc. Seems like there could be a mobetta way of doing a centralized "official" way, but alas, it is what it is. I do like the sites that gather/present data on a more granular level from interested parties installing weather gear like local schools, libraries, weather-nerds, etc.

Bologo 5y ago

It's okay but this real-time map of the weather anywhere in the world is more useful I think, with a nicer interface too: https://www.ventusky.com/ https://www.ventusky.com/

jazzyjackson 5y ago

nice! I might like to apply this to a geodesic sphere, could be arbitrarily divisible, images could fill the faces instead of floating above the map in boxes.

yesenadam 5y ago

This is so awesome, thank you! I've got friends in quite a few countries, and this in 20 minutes has told me more about what it's like where they live than I learned in the previous 10 years.

buildbuildbuild 5y ago

So many ads.

Ettaa 5y ago
one needs to make money somehow ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

krisrm 5y ago

This is really neat, but I feel like it wasn't quite designed with the red-green color blind demographic in mind ;)

OOvsuOO 5y ago

This is awesome! I can compare climates of my home to others in the world and see weather patterns all over. It's mind blowing. All though a visual medium rather than auditory (text is based on sound), which would be impossible to do the same. Or a lot harder. I think it's impressive.

knolan 5y ago

These are almost like flags. Especially so you could select the colourmap based on the countries national flag.

d--b 5y ago

I think that it would be much more readable if they inverted the x and y axes...

mrsuprawsm 5y ago

I like the way that this site lets you compare "pleasantness" of climates, e.g. humidity + temperature etc year round. This makes me wonder, where in the world has the objectively "best" climate? Comfortable or warm all year round, not too humid, not too windy, lots of sun.

nfc 5y ago
I'm gonna advocate Tenerife (my island) since it would be amazing to have more HNers around :) https://weatherspark.com/y/147639/Average-Weather-at-Tenerife-South-Airport-Spain-Year-Round https://weatherspark.com/y/147639/Average-Weather-at-Tenerif... Doesn't seem to get much better according to weatherspark :)
- AlanSE 5y ago
  It's like Hawaii, but after adding back in some "cool" temperatures. https://weatherspark.com/y/145050/Average-Weather-at-Hilo-International-Airport-Hawaii-United-States-Year-Round https://weatherspark.com/y/145050/Average-Weather-at-Hilo-In...

sails 5y ago

Very cool. Reiterate other's comments that mouse-over a fingerprint showing a hover would be great. When clicking a fingerprint, the next page should prominently show the fingerprint, burying it in the page, especially when it isn't obviously a long scroll page, made it hard to find. Please consider inverting "Spring" etc for Southern Hemisphere, as currently it has a _very_ Northern centric view of the world. Thanks!

jacobn 5y ago
Spring in NYC is Mar-May: https://weatherspark.com/s/23912/0/Average-Spring-Weather-in-New-York-City-New-York-United-States https://weatherspark.com/s/23912/0/Average-Spring-Weather-in... Spring in Sydney is Sep-Nov: https://weatherspark.com/s/144544/0/Average-Spring-Weather-in-Sydney-Australia https://weatherspark.com/s/144544/0/Average-Spring-Weather-i... But maybe you meant something else?
- sails 5y ago
  Yes I meant when comparing, per below, Sydney is 20-30 degrees celcius in "Winter". Not sure why that view defaults with the seasonal labels. https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/0/23912~149466/Comparison-of-the-Average-Spring-Weather-in-New-York-City-and-Sydney-International-Airport https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/0/23912~149466/Comparison... This second link gives a better view https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/23912~149466/Comparison-of-the-Average-Weather-in-New-York-City-and-Sydney-International-Airport https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/23912~149466/Comparison-o...
  - jacobn 5y ago
    Ah, we use the first location's view of the world, so [0] does Mar-May, and [1] does Sep-Nov [0]: https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/0/23912~149466/Comparison-of-the-Average-Spring-Weather-in-New-York-City-and-Sydney-International-Airport https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/0/23912~149466/Comparison... [1]: https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/0/149466~23912/Comparison-of-the-Average-Spring-Weather-at-Sydney-International-Airport-and-New-York-City https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/0/149466~23912/Comparison... We've added double-x-axis for comparisons to the todo-list.

joeberon 5y ago

Please add celcius to the scale EDIT: it can be changed at the top right

mFixman 5y ago
I can only see data on Celcius. Maybe it depends on your location?
- joeberon 5y ago
  I'm in Germany

foota 5y ago

It's a little weird looking at e.g., Central Africa and seeing no maps. Maybe they chose locations based on population? Either way, would be nice to fix this, as there are places with data available.

jacobn 5y ago
We show temperature fingerprints for all the weather stations in our network, you can find links to the data sources here: https://weatherspark.com/y/147186/Average-Weather-at-John-F.-Kennedy-International-Airport-New-York-United-States-Year-Round#Sections-Sources https://weatherspark.com/y/147186/Average-Weather-at-John-F....
- foota 5y ago
  I think something is missing here, this[1] is a zoomed in image of Africa, there are clearly stations in DRC and Angola, but no snapshots show there. https://imgur.com/a/KmkVoUJ https://imgur.com/a/KmkVoUJ

bluenose69 5y ago

From the point of view of someone living in northern North America, this is quite warmth-biased, with * temperatures below "very cold" being called "freezing" (huh? mere freezing is not considered terribly cold in much of North America, where "very cold" would likely restricted for T < -20C or so) * "comfortable" extending into times of year when the heat and humidity bothers most locals * the favourable tourist times being centred on warm periods, in contrast to the actually favoured period of autumn, with warm days and crisp nights, the trees a marvel of colour.

dwd 5y ago
Their tourism score for Queensland, Australia is completely back-to-front. The climate is tropical/sub-tropical so peak tourism season is winter when it's warm, clear skies and no rain. Summertime is storm season: muggy, cloudy and heavy rain. Summer is also stinger season so you can't swim north of Cairns without head-to-toe covering due to the box jellyfish risk.
jwalton 5y ago
“Comfortable” is not only a function of temperature, but also relative humidity and wind speed. Based on this site, there are no good times to visit Hawaii - it’s always too warm to be comfortable, even in the middle of the night. I assure you this is not the case. ;) It is a “temperature fingerprint”, and not a comfort fingerprint, but maybe “neutral” would be a better word here.
jrd79 5y ago
I was the one who devised those labels and it was hard to come up with the words to describe the temperature ranges (we also report the raw temperature range for each category, so you can remap the words as you please). I did my best, looking at a variety of sources and relying on my own experience, having lived in a variety of climates myself. The one that I was quite confident would be widely agreed upon was "freezing", since it has such a literal meaning of a temperature where water freezes. But as with all things weather, its complicated. Personal preference, clothing choices, activities, all contribute. But we hope the fingerprints are nevertheless and informative and interesting way to explore the average weather!

sega_sai 5y ago

It'd be cool to be able to show the most similar fingerprints for any location. I.e. I want to see which locations have similar climate to city X.

jacobn 5y ago
On each annual report page, at the bottom of the Temperature section, just before the "Compare X to another city" section there's a paragraph that for NYC reads: "Gedzhukh, Russia (5,672 miles away) and Yatsuomachi-higashikumisaka, Japan (6,752 miles) are the far-away foreign places with temperatures most similar to New York City (view comparison)." - it's a little hard to find, but there's a lot of info competing for attention, not to mention the ads :-/ https://weatherspark.com/y/23912/Average-Weather-in-New-York-City-New-York-United-States-Year-Round#Figures-ColorTemperature https://weatherspark.com/y/23912/Average-Weather-in-New-York... is the closest to a direct link

0xTJ 5y ago

I makes me a bit sad that I've moved from Ottawa to Toronto, cutting my time in the "freezing" from 3 months to half that. Seeing a 3D stacking over the years (maybe a moving average) would be interesting, to see how much things have warmed since I was a kid. Overall, that's a neat page!

nwatab 5y ago

looks very interesting! helps me to compare my current location and the next destination to travel.

FR10 5y ago

Great visualization. Just a heads up, it seems that the cloud coverage is backwards at least in Lima. The cloudy months IRL are exactly the opposite of what the graph suggests.

wjan 5y ago

Let me plug my personal project, which is similar to what's presented here: http://weathernomad.com http://weathernomad.com

marto1 5y ago

It's really amazing how much information is there for each location. Does anyone know more about how long was this info gathered and how ?