Hi all! Some background on the project: I want to build a house someday, and the first step is deciding where to build. I knew an interactive map like this would be useful, but after fiddling with leaflet.js for a while and googling for climate data, I felt a bit lost. So I decided to try something new: I hired a contractor on Upwork who had experience with map visualizations. They built an MVP within a few weeks, and from there I was able to tweak and optimize the code to my liking. I think this is a great strategy for side projects that you're too busy for. :)
It's still mostly a toy at this point, but I'd like to add more knobs and data so that I can narrow down the best place to live (and hopefully help other people do the same). If you want to contribute, the code is open source: https://github.com/lukechampine/goldilocks
The site weighs about 1.6 MB (gzipped -- the full climate data is ~35 MB uncompressed!) and is hosted on a Linode, which seems to be holding up pretty well.
Also, a big thank you to those in the comments who shared links to similar projects! The "pleasant places" map is super close to what I want. Ideally this project would look something like that, but with the ability to select your own preferences for what constitutes a "perfect" day.
This is awesome. You'll probably want to at least cross-reference this with the dew point, as temperature is only part of the story when it comes to being a comfortable human. Humidity has a large effect on how we perceive a given temperature.
As someone who is considering my next place in the world to live for a 5-10 year period, it would be amazing if this website could support world data, not just the US. If needed, I'm ready to help fund the expansion to support more parts of the world :)
I thought about making something like this too, years ago. I wanted to converge data from tornados, fault lines, flooding, and hurricaine probabilities. But then I got sucked into EVERY parameter I might want to consider, like air traffic (vortac lines), distance to power grid, UPS coverage, internet coverage, cellular coverage... and eventually the amount of data crushed my brain and the project never even made it to a NextJS boilerplate. :) So if you want to add more data... hint hint hint. :)
How did you "bend" those hexagons? What's going on there as I go from coast to coast? Is that to map them to a sphere?
This sounds super cool! I'm currently in grad school in an entirely different subject, but I have experience in (spacial) data vis and web scraping. I've used it for some side projects probably few people would find interesting, but that help me in my daily lives. Would upwork potentially enable me to do similar work for clients? Does anyone have any recommendations?
this is cool - i've spent way too much time just sort of synthesizing this sort of data in my brain with no hard evidence.
One knob I'd love to have is the ability to tune the # of days ranges - "above 200" is a pretty large bucket depending on how you tune the other numbers. It looks this is changeable in the code, but maybe it's tied tightly to the available data?
Really great! In addition to humidity which others have mentioned, average sunny days per year might be another good metro. From a temperature standpoint it looks like Seattle is ideal for me, but I’m fairly certain I couldn’t handle that few sunny days.
Neat project! Would be nice if it integrated data like wildfires, mudslides, floods, storms/winds, crime, mosquito populations, to be a truly useful aid in home site locating.
I like data like this - it reminds me of the pleasant places maps[1].
That said - you have to be wary of both types of maps because it doesn't take into account other potentially annoying factors. The biggest being humidity - there's a huge difference between 90 degree phoenix and 90 degree miami. Then there's rainfall, and one a lot of people don't think about - wind.
To add - if you're thinking about seriously comparing two climates, check out this comparison tool [2]. Has any metric you can dream of charted together.
Hmm, I can probably incorporate humidity data without too much trouble. Is there a standard way to calculate a "feels like" temperature using humidity?
btw, thanks for reminding me of the pleasant places map -- I think it must have been an unconscious influence on this.
Yeah this paints most of the Southwest as having a worse climate than where I live, which... yeah, for anyone who hates humidity (which is most people, I think?), that's not remotely true. I'd take 95F and bone dry over 82F and soaking-wet air, any day. Happily.
I must say, it's frustrating clicking this link and landing on a page narrowed to the USA, and, to top it off, in Fahrenheit… Maybe a title change would be welcome.
Such zones won't necessarily be very stable. Current climate trends point towards an increase in hot humid conditions in some areas, increased aridity and drought in others, and associated extreme weather conditions. If there's any one culprit to point to, it's the water vapor increase (forced in turn by the increase in atmospheric fossil CO2 and CH4). This also affects wet-bulb temperature (which sets an upper limit on outdoor activity):
Climate-resistant design and construction is going to be a booming field in years to come. Termite-type underground construction, fire-resistant bunkers in dry zones, maybe flood-resistant floatable housing in flood zones, solar-powered AC units, etc. A lot of climates are more tolerable if you have a refuge to escape to.
Those finding fault in this may be better served by the B6ppen climate classification, which is a global index that takes into account not just temperature but also rainfall and whether the rain is strongest in summer or winter.
Notably, it shows that the idyllic Mediterranean/Californian climate can also be found in parts of Western Australia, South Africa, and Chile.
Is there a good dataset for getting the Koppen classifications of different regions? I can find a lot of pictures of the map, but I'm having trouble finding shapefiles or another GIS format.
Cape Town South Africa, Coastal Southern California/Mexico, and Pacific Northwest Jun to Sep are as good as it gets in my opinion. Nairobi is up there too, but I have not spent enough time there to know about year round.
200-366 days at the top end is an enormous range (substantially larger than all the others, for some reason) - nearly half the year. I hate hot weather, and this didn't really help me filter out places that have horrible summers, because the summer is, yes, less than 166 days long. I assume people who dislike cold weather would feel similarly. So this is...kind of useless?
And this is why SF is so popular. It is a shame Florida never developed a huge tech hub, but Miami has plenty of other stuff going for it. (besides hurricanes)
People don't get it, SF will be always popular because the climate is just that good. Seattle is a close #2 IMHO, but you have to be able to put up with 8 months of grey, which is a huge "but".
Reading the comments makes me wonder if I'm the only one who would even be interested in this, but I really like variety, so I'd love to be able to be able to layer semitranslucent layers on top of each other.
It's probably way too much customization, but if I want somewhere that has at least 30 days that don't get over 30 degrees, as well as maybe 15 days above 90 degrees, I'd kind of have to have it open in two windows and compare locations myself, as opposed to being able to set which end of the color spectrum would be my "green" for each filter, layer them on top of each other, and just look for the greenest places.
But it seems like most people have a preference for consistent weather, so you're probably nailing your target market's wishes!
I already know I love where I live, too, so it'd be fun to look at where else might suit me, but I'm not making plans to move based on a hope of weather improvement.
Yeah, big +1 on seasons and variety. I grew up on the east coast so I guess I'm just kind acclimated to it, but I never got being so obsessed with the weather.
Like when I go outside and it's freezing, am I like "yay"? No. But there is a coziness to the winter I appreciate, getting to go inside and warm up. And then warmer weather starts to come, and you feel relieved by it, you get to actually be like "yay, Spring is here!", instead of just getting acclimated to it being spring all the time. You get to cycle through different fashion styles too (which until a few years ago I wouldn't have really thought about, but have started to care about more recently). I think happiness is more about deltas than steady state, and so I think it is actually nicer to get to experience the variety.
But even ignoring all of that, the fact that weather is so important to someone that they consider moving over it just feels so alien to me.
I also like variety. I would've liked to see how closely the temperature distribution in a cell matches a normal distribution parameterized by the slider instead of how many days fall in that bucket. That would reward closer matches over places that just maintain one temperature.
If anybody knows how to search the USA (or elsewhere) for the place with the highest [*] mixing height, I will give you all of my internet points and sing your praises for the rest of eternity. Here is what the mixing height looks like for a random spot in Washington State:
NOAA doesn't seem to publish any data on actual mixing height, and even these forecasted mixing heights are only available for some areas (I can't find them for anyplace in Northern California, for example).
I am extremely sensitive to air pollution and this is, by far, the number one factor that correlates with my well-being. You'd think that coastal areas mean "clean ocean air", but they also tend to have very low mixing heights (Los Angeles is an extreme example) so when the wind isn't blowing in from the ocean it's pretty bad. Desert areas have spectacularly high mixing heights during the day, but near zero at night.
[*] Technically I'm trying to optimize for the highest height of the lowest Nth percentile (for something like N=5%).
I've found Weather Spark to be a useful tool for researching ideal climates: https://weatherspark.com/. It has detailed temperature breakouts by time of day and year, wind speed, humidity, rainfall, etc.
One thing I've started to pay a lot more attention to is rainfall. The temperature in Southern California (where I currently live) is certainly pleasant, but that comes with the tradeoff of very limited rainfall, which seems to be having an increasingly negative impact as the years wear on.
I believe you are going to add more. Here are a few things I learnt after listening to a wealthy person looking for a place in India to build massive research, retreat kinda home, for his family, and the people who pop in to live their work.
The temperature range is one of the many factors. Even in a hotter area (from statistics), you can create a pleasant environment around the year if you have enough space and strategically plant trees and other greens, without any artificial air conditioning.
Soil: Look for soil quality and their changes over time and thus the likelihood of future quality.
Water: This is one of the most important ones. I believe you want to live/retire in the outskirts, grow your food, etc. Water plays a crucial role in what you want to do and what life you will have.
Calamities: History of natural calamities.
The others will be crime rates, political unrests, and accessibility, depending on how far you want to stay away from the crowd.
Nonetheless, your app is super cool and has given me ideas. Start with all the software possible and commission a small research team to pinpoint a few locations and zero in your final choices. ;-)
I've become a little obsessed with the history of the US in the 19th century, and this map does an amazing job at helping visualize the seriousness and difficulty that frontier livers and westward migrators faced back then.
It's also just damn interesting as an interactive climate map!
A site like this should use the heat index or the wet bulb temperature.
The reason is that 35 °C (95 °F) is fatal to humans within hours at 100% relative humidity, but relatively comfortable at 10% humidity for people who are drinking enough water and have sun protection.
One thing that isn't very intuitive – on a map dealing with temperature you'd immediately expect a range of red to blue colors to represent hotter/colder regions. In this case, maybe a different color scheme would help in representing # days more clearly.
[+] [-] nemo1618|4 years ago|reply
It's still mostly a toy at this point, but I'd like to add more knobs and data so that I can narrow down the best place to live (and hopefully help other people do the same). If you want to contribute, the code is open source: https://github.com/lukechampine/goldilocks
The site weighs about 1.6 MB (gzipped -- the full climate data is ~35 MB uncompressed!) and is hosted on a Linode, which seems to be holding up pretty well.
Also, a big thank you to those in the comments who shared links to similar projects! The "pleasant places" map is super close to what I want. Ideally this project would look something like that, but with the ability to select your own preferences for what constitutes a "perfect" day.
[+] [-] onelesd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chockchocschoir|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gotaquestion|4 years ago|reply
I thought about making something like this too, years ago. I wanted to converge data from tornados, fault lines, flooding, and hurricaine probabilities. But then I got sucked into EVERY parameter I might want to consider, like air traffic (vortac lines), distance to power grid, UPS coverage, internet coverage, cellular coverage... and eventually the amount of data crushed my brain and the project never even made it to a NextJS boilerplate. :) So if you want to add more data... hint hint hint. :)
How did you "bend" those hexagons? What's going on there as I go from coast to coast? Is that to map them to a sphere?
[+] [-] pharmakom|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alhirzel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 404mm|4 years ago|reply
I went through scraping weather averages and graphing them in elk, then finding https://weatherspark.com/map and now this. Best option yet.
[+] [-] oh_sigh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mahathu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ledauphin|4 years ago|reply
One knob I'd love to have is the ability to tune the # of days ranges - "above 200" is a pretty large bucket depending on how you tune the other numbers. It looks this is changeable in the code, but maybe it's tied tightly to the available data?
[+] [-] heavyset_go|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grosswait|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pengaru|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mempko|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghostly_s|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bumblebritches5|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] silisili|4 years ago|reply
That said - you have to be wary of both types of maps because it doesn't take into account other potentially annoying factors. The biggest being humidity - there's a huge difference between 90 degree phoenix and 90 degree miami. Then there's rainfall, and one a lot of people don't think about - wind.
To add - if you're thinking about seriously comparing two climates, check out this comparison tool [2]. Has any metric you can dream of charted together.
1 - https://kellegous.com/j/2014/02/03/pleasant-places/
2 - https://outflux.net/weather/noaa/index.php
[+] [-] nemo1618|4 years ago|reply
btw, thanks for reminding me of the pleasant places map -- I think it must have been an unconscious influence on this.
[+] [-] brimble|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdsaga12|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amarshall|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|4 years ago|reply
I don't need the weather to be ideal - as long as it's not rainy, the high is below 40, and it's a wet bulb with no wind - that works for me.
[+] [-] rosetremiere|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nemo1618|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aeolun|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photochemsyn|4 years ago|reply
https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/3151/too-hot-to-ha...
Climate-resistant design and construction is going to be a booming field in years to come. Termite-type underground construction, fire-resistant bunkers in dry zones, maybe flood-resistant floatable housing in flood zones, solar-powered AC units, etc. A lot of climates are more tolerable if you have a refuge to escape to.
[+] [-] foolfoolz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakear|4 years ago|reply
Notably, it shows that the idyllic Mediterranean/Californian climate can also be found in parts of Western Australia, South Africa, and Chile.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classifica...
[+] [-] richiebful1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wk_end|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] com2kid|4 years ago|reply
People don't get it, SF will be always popular because the climate is just that good. Seattle is a close #2 IMHO, but you have to be able to put up with 8 months of grey, which is a huge "but".
[+] [-] smeej|4 years ago|reply
It's probably way too much customization, but if I want somewhere that has at least 30 days that don't get over 30 degrees, as well as maybe 15 days above 90 degrees, I'd kind of have to have it open in two windows and compare locations myself, as opposed to being able to set which end of the color spectrum would be my "green" for each filter, layer them on top of each other, and just look for the greenest places.
But it seems like most people have a preference for consistent weather, so you're probably nailing your target market's wishes!
I already know I love where I live, too, so it'd be fun to look at where else might suit me, but I'm not making plans to move based on a hope of weather improvement.
[+] [-] alecbz|4 years ago|reply
Like when I go outside and it's freezing, am I like "yay"? No. But there is a coziness to the winter I appreciate, getting to go inside and warm up. And then warmer weather starts to come, and you feel relieved by it, you get to actually be like "yay, Spring is here!", instead of just getting acclimated to it being spring all the time. You get to cycle through different fashion styles too (which until a few years ago I wouldn't have really thought about, but have started to care about more recently). I think happiness is more about deltas than steady state, and so I think it is actually nicer to get to experience the variety.
But even ignoring all of that, the fact that weather is so important to someone that they consider moving over it just feels so alien to me.
[+] [-] kevmo314|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] om3n|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 4ndrewl|4 years ago|reply
It's still pretty neat though. :)
[+] [-] dr_orpheus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unsupp0rted|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] octoberfranklin|4 years ago|reply
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?w3u=1&w13=mhgt&w13...
NOAA doesn't seem to publish any data on actual mixing height, and even these forecasted mixing heights are only available for some areas (I can't find them for anyplace in Northern California, for example).
I am extremely sensitive to air pollution and this is, by far, the number one factor that correlates with my well-being. You'd think that coastal areas mean "clean ocean air", but they also tend to have very low mixing heights (Los Angeles is an extreme example) so when the wind isn't blowing in from the ocean it's pretty bad. Desert areas have spectacularly high mixing heights during the day, but near zero at night.
[*] Technically I'm trying to optimize for the highest height of the lowest Nth percentile (for something like N=5%).
[+] [-] mmckelvy|4 years ago|reply
One thing I've started to pay a lot more attention to is rainfall. The temperature in Southern California (where I currently live) is certainly pleasant, but that comes with the tradeoff of very limited rainfall, which seems to be having an increasingly negative impact as the years wear on.
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] odiroot|4 years ago|reply
I wish this website supported Europe and Asia.
[+] [-] Brajeshwar|4 years ago|reply
The temperature range is one of the many factors. Even in a hotter area (from statistics), you can create a pleasant environment around the year if you have enough space and strategically plant trees and other greens, without any artificial air conditioning.
Soil: Look for soil quality and their changes over time and thus the likelihood of future quality.
Water: This is one of the most important ones. I believe you want to live/retire in the outskirts, grow your food, etc. Water plays a crucial role in what you want to do and what life you will have.
Calamities: History of natural calamities.
The others will be crime rates, political unrests, and accessibility, depending on how far you want to stay away from the crowd.
Nonetheless, your app is super cool and has given me ideas. Start with all the software possible and commission a small research team to pinpoint a few locations and zero in your final choices. ;-)
[+] [-] freedomben|4 years ago|reply
It's also just damn interesting as an interactive climate map!
[+] [-] Floegipoky|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] not2b|4 years ago|reply
The reason is that 35 °C (95 °F) is fatal to humans within hours at 100% relative humidity, but relatively comfortable at 10% humidity for people who are drinking enough water and have sun protection.
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|4 years ago|reply
Then my friend told me about the Kenyan Highlands, which he thinks has the best climate. It's basically 23C year round!
[+] [-] mLuby|4 years ago|reply
Don't know what kind of data sources there are for this but voracious insects can make an otherwise lovely climate unbearable.
[+] [-] paxys|4 years ago|reply