6 ms·

Comparing the Latitude of Europe and America

74 points by mooreds 1y ago

taeric 1y ago
A map that also shows the difference between winter and summer for day length would be great. It is down right quaint hearing people bitch about the hour of change that DST does compared to the near 6 hours that nature has already taken. (Note, this doesn't require contextualizing to across the ocean.) Similarly, for storms and such, knowing just how different the east coast of the US is compared to many of the places that people came from is amusing. What I thought of as normal rain is evidently comparable to the gods wanting to kill you. Always amusing when people ask, "doesn't it rain a lot in Seattle" for me. I don't know that I would have called what we get rain.
- christophilus 1y ago
  I really missed the good, intense thunderstorms of the US southeast when I lived in Seattle. Seattle gets a good misting from time to time, but I almost never bothered with rain gear or an umbrella while living there.
  - taeric 1y ago
    Exactly. It really makes the discussions around how loud fireworks are kind of hard to listen to. It isn't that they are wrong. More that it was a regular thing for storms to shake the house. Our dogs were terrified of "what the F is happening out there." On the regular.
- AlotOfReading 1y ago
  I mind DST because I have to consider clock changes, not because I care how many hours of sunlight are in the period between 6h and 18h. Even the extreme of Arctic winter is annoying only because 4h looking similar to 16h messes with your awareness of time until you adopt a structured schedule.
  - taeric 1y ago
    And that was largely a fair point back before we had everything managed by computers. Nowadays, I'd wager the vast majority of folks didn't realize their phone's changed overnight. My kids certainly didn't realize it. Not that I don't think we couldn't have a better system. But nobody likes my idea of "base it on the month with 6 going up 10 minutes and 6 going down." Well... I think some folks like the idea, but nobody (including me) thinks that is where we are headed.
    - jcattle 1y ago
      I don't know about the poster before me, but it is not so much about actual clocks changing but about the biological clock changing.
      - taeric 1y ago
        Right, and that I think is far easier to deal with than you realize. Easier if you don't try it in 1 hour jumps twice a year. But basically every animal already has to deal with the shift due to the nature of actual sunlight. And we do just fine by that. (I should add that I have also never used an alarm clock. The shift from DST has never really been difficult to manage. Only was hard when I would be awake, but not leave for work/school on time because I forgot to update the clock.)
        AlotOfReading 1y ago
        What time will X occur on a particular future date? E.g. meetings. What time will X occur in another time zone? What time will X occur across multiple time zones that shift at different times? What time will X occur across multiple time zones where one doesn't shift at all? E.g. meetings with people in Arizona. How long ago did X occur, across a transition? E.g. correlating Unix time to civil time. How long is X, where X is an event spanning multiple time zones that shift independently? E.g. plane flights. Does my cron job need to run intermittently every X hours, or at 24/X particular times every day, or every X hours but managed so that processing doesn't intrude into normal business hours? Personally, when I'm in the wilderness my circadian rhythm follows the sun. Up at sunrise and asleep not long after sunset. That's not how I work when I'm living in society, so I don't see why animal adaptations are particularly relevant here. On a social level, the shift causes tremendous levels of stress to people. It essentially creates a day of national jet lag, for no real benefit that I can see.
- madcaptenor 1y ago
  See the maps here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-17/this-simple-great-map-shows-that-seattle-is-far-from-america-s-rainiest-city https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-17/this-simp... Most of the eastern US gets more inches of precipitation than Seattle. But there are few places (mostly in a band from eastern Ohio and West Virginia, across Upstate New York, through to northern New England) that have more days with measurable precipitation than Seattle. Someone also pulled data on the fifty largest cities: https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/01/16/how-rainy-seattle-its-not-even-top-30-major-us-cities-13733 https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/01/16/how-rainy-seattle-its-n.... Seattle is 32nd for amount of rain but 5th (behind Buffalo, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh in the band I mentioned, and also its neighbor Portland) for number of rainy days.
  - taeric 1y ago
    I think that is basically the map I was asking for, so kudos on that. I still think it fails to capture what it means to be a rainy day. Is about like when Seattle has a snow day. If you are from a place that actually gets snow, you'd scoff at us calling it a snow storm. I think my favorite is the few times it thunders. People would all move to windows in a sort of awe at the loud noise.
    - madcaptenor 1y ago
      Yeah, you want some threshold for amount of rain that's higher than "measurable precipitation".
cyberax 1y ago
A beautiful illustration of why solar power is a no-brainer for California or Arizona, but is a doubtful proposition for Germany.
- tzs 1y ago
  Solar power is not a doubtful proposition for Germany [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany
- t_tsonev 1y ago
  You need a Solar Radiance map to say thay. Latitude is a factor, but so is climate. Here's an example: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/ https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/ California and Arizona are comparable to Sahara, but Germany has much usable potential too.
  - modo_mario 1y ago
    The issue is that in winter in the likes of berlin when the need for power is highest you might as well not have them.
    - actionfromafar 1y ago
      The issue is that as solar panels become cheaper than dirt, we will find ways to use them which are not "base load" things. Maybe we in the future will factor in the annual Solar Harvest into our energy plans.
      - modo_mario 1y ago
        >we will find ways to use them which are not "base load" things If you build solar for much of base load there for those clouded winter weeks where you won't even hope to reach the average winter output then i'm curious what those applications will be that'll fit the model of capitalism. Are you gonna overbuild 20fold with matching grid (not talking about that north-south connection that Germany can't seem to manage) and have metalurgy industries that will only run in summer? Or are you going to build/maintain gas plants at a fraction of the cost even if solar panels end up dirt cheap for those weeks where people still want to run their industries and heatpumps and continue to add to the problem. Looking at my own gov and what i expect from the german one I think I know the answers.
epicureanideal 1y ago
It would also be interesting to see a version corrected for the warmer temperatures due to Atlantic currents. Although that might cause some sort of near-Atlantic or near-Mediterranean "skew" in the map rather than the whole map dropping or raising by some amount, but maybe adjusting the whole map could be a reasonable first approximation.
zkmon 1y ago
Interesting. The city replacements are cool. What's the point though? Climate doesn't exactly align with latitude, and has other factors. Lifestyle, food, culture would also not depend on latitude.
- RandallBrown 1y ago
  > Climate doesn't exactly align with latitude, and has other factors. I think that's what makes this interesting. For many people it does and this challenges that assumption.
  - yen223 1y ago
    I travelled from Sydney to Cape Town a while back. Both cities are roughly on the same latitude, and it shows. The climate was similar, temperatures were similar, even the type of vegetation that showed up were similar. Trekking through South African veldt felt much the same as walking through Australian bush
    - SwiftyBug 1y ago
      I had the same feeling when I lived in Porto and later visited San Francisco. The two cities have so much in common: similar temperatures, they're both famous for their bridges (Porto actually has several), the fog that rolls in regularly, and even their most iconic bodies of water both have "gold" in the name: the Golden Gate and Rio Douro (which means "golden river"). I think this comes from how the water looks golden at sunset, since both coastlines face west. And of course, both cities are known for their cable cars.
j_french 1y ago
Shout out to the gulf stream for keeping Ireland's climate significantly more temperate than our Canadian latitude neighbours. As kids when we looked out to sea on the west coast we thought next stop was New York, but it's more like Newfoundland. If (when?) the gulf stream gets significantly disrupted it's gonna be a major shock
- CalRobert 1y ago
  Fortunately, Ireland’s woefully inadequate climate policies may help give us a chance to study the phenomenon of AMOC collapse within our lifetimes!
  - Supernaut 1y ago
    Ireland's climate policies, whether adequate or inadequate, can have very little affect on the evolution of the AMOC, or any other large-scale climactic phenomenon. There are vastly more influential factors at play all around the world.
    - CalRobert 1y ago
      Inasmuch as it’s a country of five million people you are right in absolute terms, but considering the government’s shocked Pikachu face reaction to being held to the terms of an agreement Ireland signed up to it’s still a bit galling. https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2025/1027/1540633-analysis-comment-eu-climate-goals/ https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2025/1027/15406... Ireland “has the largest emissions per person in the EU for the sectors covered by the regulation.”
      - igleria 1y ago
        And we are not even building enough housing as it is, imagine if we were...
        CalRobert 1y ago
incognito124 1y ago
Scrollable map of the whole world: https://www.bytemuse.com/post/interactive-equivalent-latitude-map/ https://www.bytemuse.com/post/interactive-equivalent-latitud...
wvh 1y ago
The US is a lot more down south than I thought. That somewhat explains you guys' love of air conditioning... I don't know how valid a climate comparison based purely on latitude is though... Surely Egypt is generally warmer than Florida?
- noir_lord 1y ago
  Latitude is one factor but not the sole factor, proximity to oceans/seas for example matters as well as it has a moderating influence in both dimensions - not a coincidence that the coldest states in the continental US are all northern and in the center of the landmass. Other factors are things like prevailing winds, mountain ranges, altitude and so on and on - the climate system is one of the most complex systems on the planet and even with decades of heavy study and insanely fast computers we still struggle to predict it accurately out past a week or two at most with any degree of success.
  - Ma8ee 1y ago
    We struggle to predict the weather, not the climate.
    - jandrewrogers 1y ago
      In fairness, we struggle to predict both.
- FartinMowler 1y ago
  Yup. And Toronto in Canada is closer to the equator than to the north Pole.
k__ 1y ago
I always thought it was funny that the north of the US becomes as snow paradise in the winter, while most of Germany, which is at Canada level, just becomes a bit colder version of autumn at that time.
- fransje26 1y ago
  No worries, we'll get the snow back in Germany soon..
timonoko 1y ago
"Horrible Winters here in Wyoming". Checking the map -- same latitude as Rome. "Ok son. Close the window."
- lm28469 1y ago
  And that's why with a bit of ingenuity you can grow plants year round in Maine as it has the same day length as northern Italy https://youtu.be/Xm6khNRIGhE?t=334 https://youtu.be/Xm6khNRIGhE?t=334
flobosg 1y ago
(2015)
- nervousvarun 1y ago
  Just curious...what's the point of pointing out the year? Typically that's done to emphasize out of date content. Would you expect a map of comparative latitudes to significantly change in a decade?
  - flobosg 1y ago
    See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45716365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45716365
    - nervousvarun 1y ago
      Ah ok. That’s uh…a quite the obscure custom but alrighty then!
voxleone 1y ago
The Falkland-Malvinas islands are at the same latitude of the UK and have a climate similar to Scotland.
cwmoore 1y ago
Neat overlay but a missed opportunity to include actual lines of latitude.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

74 points by mooreds 1y ago

A map that also shows the difference between winter and summer for day length would be great. It is down right quaint hearing people bitch about the hour of change that DST does compared to the near 6 hours that nature has already taken. (Note, this doesn't require contextualizing to across the ocean.) Similarly, for storms and such, knowing just how different the east coast of the US is compared to many of the places that people came from is amusing. What I thought of as normal rain is evidently comparable to the gods wanting to kill you. Always amusing when people ask, "doesn't it rain a lot in Seattle" for me. I don't know that I would have called what we get rain.

christophilus 1y ago
I really missed the good, intense thunderstorms of the US southeast when I lived in Seattle. Seattle gets a good misting from time to time, but I almost never bothered with rain gear or an umbrella while living there.
- taeric 1y ago
  Exactly. It really makes the discussions around how loud fireworks are kind of hard to listen to. It isn't that they are wrong. More that it was a regular thing for storms to shake the house. Our dogs were terrified of "what the F is happening out there." On the regular.
AlotOfReading 1y ago
I mind DST because I have to consider clock changes, not because I care how many hours of sunlight are in the period between 6h and 18h. Even the extreme of Arctic winter is annoying only because 4h looking similar to 16h messes with your awareness of time until you adopt a structured schedule.
- taeric 1y ago
  And that was largely a fair point back before we had everything managed by computers. Nowadays, I'd wager the vast majority of folks didn't realize their phone's changed overnight. My kids certainly didn't realize it. Not that I don't think we couldn't have a better system. But nobody likes my idea of "base it on the month with 6 going up 10 minutes and 6 going down." Well... I think some folks like the idea, but nobody (including me) thinks that is where we are headed.
  - jcattle 1y ago
    I don't know about the poster before me, but it is not so much about actual clocks changing but about the biological clock changing.
    - taeric 1y ago
      Right, and that I think is far easier to deal with than you realize. Easier if you don't try it in 1 hour jumps twice a year. But basically every animal already has to deal with the shift due to the nature of actual sunlight. And we do just fine by that. (I should add that I have also never used an alarm clock. The shift from DST has never really been difficult to manage. Only was hard when I would be awake, but not leave for work/school on time because I forgot to update the clock.)
      - AlotOfReading 1y ago
        What time will X occur on a particular future date? E.g. meetings. What time will X occur in another time zone? What time will X occur across multiple time zones that shift at different times? What time will X occur across multiple time zones where one doesn't shift at all? E.g. meetings with people in Arizona. How long ago did X occur, across a transition? E.g. correlating Unix time to civil time. How long is X, where X is an event spanning multiple time zones that shift independently? E.g. plane flights. Does my cron job need to run intermittently every X hours, or at 24/X particular times every day, or every X hours but managed so that processing doesn't intrude into normal business hours? Personally, when I'm in the wilderness my circadian rhythm follows the sun. Up at sunrise and asleep not long after sunset. That's not how I work when I'm living in society, so I don't see why animal adaptations are particularly relevant here. On a social level, the shift causes tremendous levels of stress to people. It essentially creates a day of national jet lag, for no real benefit that I can see.
madcaptenor 1y ago
See the maps here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-17/this-simple-great-map-shows-that-seattle-is-far-from-america-s-rainiest-city https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-17/this-simp... Most of the eastern US gets more inches of precipitation than Seattle. But there are few places (mostly in a band from eastern Ohio and West Virginia, across Upstate New York, through to northern New England) that have more days with measurable precipitation than Seattle. Someone also pulled data on the fifty largest cities: https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/01/16/how-rainy-seattle-its-not-even-top-30-major-us-cities-13733 https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/01/16/how-rainy-seattle-its-n.... Seattle is 32nd for amount of rain but 5th (behind Buffalo, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh in the band I mentioned, and also its neighbor Portland) for number of rainy days.
- taeric 1y ago
  I think that is basically the map I was asking for, so kudos on that. I still think it fails to capture what it means to be a rainy day. Is about like when Seattle has a snow day. If you are from a place that actually gets snow, you'd scoff at us calling it a snow storm. I think my favorite is the few times it thunders. People would all move to windows in a sort of awe at the loud noise.
  - madcaptenor 1y ago
    Yeah, you want some threshold for amount of rain that's higher than "measurable precipitation".

cyberax 1y ago

A beautiful illustration of why solar power is a no-brainer for California or Arizona, but is a doubtful proposition for Germany.

tzs 1y ago
Solar power is not a doubtful proposition for Germany [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany
t_tsonev 1y ago
You need a Solar Radiance map to say thay. Latitude is a factor, but so is climate. Here's an example: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/ https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/ California and Arizona are comparable to Sahara, but Germany has much usable potential too.
- modo_mario 1y ago
  The issue is that in winter in the likes of berlin when the need for power is highest you might as well not have them.
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    The issue is that as solar panels become cheaper than dirt, we will find ways to use them which are not "base load" things. Maybe we in the future will factor in the annual Solar Harvest into our energy plans.
    - modo_mario 1y ago
      >we will find ways to use them which are not "base load" things If you build solar for much of base load there for those clouded winter weeks where you won't even hope to reach the average winter output then i'm curious what those applications will be that'll fit the model of capitalism. Are you gonna overbuild 20fold with matching grid (not talking about that north-south connection that Germany can't seem to manage) and have metalurgy industries that will only run in summer? Or are you going to build/maintain gas plants at a fraction of the cost even if solar panels end up dirt cheap for those weeks where people still want to run their industries and heatpumps and continue to add to the problem. Looking at my own gov and what i expect from the german one I think I know the answers.

epicureanideal 1y ago

It would also be interesting to see a version corrected for the warmer temperatures due to Atlantic currents. Although that might cause some sort of near-Atlantic or near-Mediterranean "skew" in the map rather than the whole map dropping or raising by some amount, but maybe adjusting the whole map could be a reasonable first approximation.

zkmon 1y ago

Interesting. The city replacements are cool. What's the point though? Climate doesn't exactly align with latitude, and has other factors. Lifestyle, food, culture would also not depend on latitude.

RandallBrown 1y ago
> Climate doesn't exactly align with latitude, and has other factors. I think that's what makes this interesting. For many people it does and this challenges that assumption.
- yen223 1y ago
  I travelled from Sydney to Cape Town a while back. Both cities are roughly on the same latitude, and it shows. The climate was similar, temperatures were similar, even the type of vegetation that showed up were similar. Trekking through South African veldt felt much the same as walking through Australian bush
  - SwiftyBug 1y ago
    I had the same feeling when I lived in Porto and later visited San Francisco. The two cities have so much in common: similar temperatures, they're both famous for their bridges (Porto actually has several), the fog that rolls in regularly, and even their most iconic bodies of water both have "gold" in the name: the Golden Gate and Rio Douro (which means "golden river"). I think this comes from how the water looks golden at sunset, since both coastlines face west. And of course, both cities are known for their cable cars.

j_french 1y ago

Shout out to the gulf stream for keeping Ireland's climate significantly more temperate than our Canadian latitude neighbours. As kids when we looked out to sea on the west coast we thought next stop was New York, but it's more like Newfoundland. If (when?) the gulf stream gets significantly disrupted it's gonna be a major shock

CalRobert 1y ago
Fortunately, Ireland’s woefully inadequate climate policies may help give us a chance to study the phenomenon of AMOC collapse within our lifetimes!
- Supernaut 1y ago
  Ireland's climate policies, whether adequate or inadequate, can have very little affect on the evolution of the AMOC, or any other large-scale climactic phenomenon. There are vastly more influential factors at play all around the world.
  - CalRobert 1y ago
    Inasmuch as it’s a country of five million people you are right in absolute terms, but considering the government’s shocked Pikachu face reaction to being held to the terms of an agreement Ireland signed up to it’s still a bit galling. https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2025/1027/1540633-analysis-comment-eu-climate-goals/ https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2025/1027/15406... Ireland “has the largest emissions per person in the EU for the sectors covered by the regulation.”
    - igleria 1y ago
      And we are not even building enough housing as it is, imagine if we were...
      - CalRobert 1y ago

incognito124 1y ago

Scrollable map of the whole world: https://www.bytemuse.com/post/interactive-equivalent-latitude-map/ https://www.bytemuse.com/post/interactive-equivalent-latitud...

wvh 1y ago

The US is a lot more down south than I thought. That somewhat explains you guys' love of air conditioning... I don't know how valid a climate comparison based purely on latitude is though... Surely Egypt is generally warmer than Florida?

noir_lord 1y ago
Latitude is one factor but not the sole factor, proximity to oceans/seas for example matters as well as it has a moderating influence in both dimensions - not a coincidence that the coldest states in the continental US are all northern and in the center of the landmass. Other factors are things like prevailing winds, mountain ranges, altitude and so on and on - the climate system is one of the most complex systems on the planet and even with decades of heavy study and insanely fast computers we still struggle to predict it accurately out past a week or two at most with any degree of success.
- Ma8ee 1y ago
  We struggle to predict the weather, not the climate.
  - jandrewrogers 1y ago
    In fairness, we struggle to predict both.
FartinMowler 1y ago
Yup. And Toronto in Canada is closer to the equator than to the north Pole.

k__ 1y ago

I always thought it was funny that the north of the US becomes as snow paradise in the winter, while most of Germany, which is at Canada level, just becomes a bit colder version of autumn at that time.

fransje26 1y ago
No worries, we'll get the snow back in Germany soon..

timonoko 1y ago

"Horrible Winters here in Wyoming". Checking the map -- same latitude as Rome. "Ok son. Close the window."

lm28469 1y ago
And that's why with a bit of ingenuity you can grow plants year round in Maine as it has the same day length as northern Italy https://youtu.be/Xm6khNRIGhE?t=334 https://youtu.be/Xm6khNRIGhE?t=334

flobosg 1y ago

(2015)

nervousvarun 1y ago
Just curious...what's the point of pointing out the year? Typically that's done to emphasize out of date content. Would you expect a map of comparative latitudes to significantly change in a decade?
- flobosg 1y ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45716365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45716365
  - nervousvarun 1y ago
    Ah ok. That’s uh…a quite the obscure custom but alrighty then!

voxleone 1y ago

The Falkland-Malvinas islands are at the same latitude of the UK and have a climate similar to Scotland.

cwmoore 1y ago

Neat overlay but a missed opportunity to include actual lines of latitude.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]