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:
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 ;)
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.
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.
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?
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.
* 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).
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!
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.
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!
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.
“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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
[+] [-] mutagen|4 years ago|reply
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-dashboar...
https://flowingdata.com/2011/03/14/weatherspark-for-more-gra...
https://www.reddit.com/r/weather/comments/4hkbq4/rest_in_pea...
https://www.glerl.noaa.gov/pubs/fulltext/2016/20160004.pdf - The interface was even noted in a NOAA paper.
[+] [-] jacobn|4 years ago|reply
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 ;)
[+] [-] jerryluc|4 years ago|reply
https://www.trondheim.no/en/art/art-in-public-spaces/art-sun...
[+] [-] mrsuprawsm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nielsbot|4 years ago|reply
https://www.sfartscommission.org/our-role-impact/press-room/...
[+] [-] NelsonMinar|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gmurphy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Smoosh|4 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] xahrepap|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
It’s not available on the world map, but you can drill down to any year in any location we have data for.
[+] [-] detaro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluenose69|4 years ago|reply
* 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.
[+] [-] jrd79|4 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] dwd|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
It is a “temperature fingerprint”, and not a comfort fingerprint, but maybe “neutral” would be a better word here.
[+] [-] max_|4 years ago|reply
They are really worth checking out as I find some of them very useful.
[0]: https://cedarlakeventures.com/
[+] [-] yesenadam|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philmcp|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mrsuprawsm|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
https://weatherspark.com/y/147639/Average-Weather-at-Tenerif...
Doesn't seem to get much better according to weatherspark :)
[+] [-] krisrm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylan604|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lifthrasiir|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dom96|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sails|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
Spring in Sydney is Sep-Nov: https://weatherspark.com/s/144544/0/Average-Spring-Weather-i...
But maybe you meant something else?
[+] [-] OOvsuOO|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dzhiurgis|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 0xTJ|4 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] NKosmatos|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlovich123|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yosito|4 years ago|reply