Show HN: A world map of 24x365 average temperature “fingerprints” | Hacker News Reader

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

weatherspark.com

347 pointsjacobn80 comments

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-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.

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 ;)

That dashboard was gold. RIP.

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.

Thank you so much for that, I miss it terribly but understand that it wasn't worth the effort. It was beautiful while it lasted. (and this map is super cool too)

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...

There's a similar work in San Francisco: A solar totem by Charles Sowers

https://www.sfartscommission.org/our-role-impact/press-room/...

Cool! Are there any pictures available of the tin plate after the year is completed?

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 (some of them not burned yet)

From the end of the long album here: 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.

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.

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)

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.

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).

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).

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.

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!

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-tho...

The closest thing we have for specific years is this: 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.

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.

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.

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!

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/

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.

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"

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.

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-Tenerif...

Doesn't seem to get much better according to weatherspark :)

It's like Hawaii, but after adding back in some "cool" temperatures.

https://weatherspark.com/y/145050/Average-Weather-at-Hilo-In...

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

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.

Ah, fixed, thanks!

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

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!

Spring in NYC is Mar-May: 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-i...

But maybe you meant something else?

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...

This second link gives a better view

https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/23912~149466/Comparison-o...

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...

[1]: https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/0/149466~23912/Comparison...

We've added double-x-axis for comparisons to the todo-list.

Fair enough, thanks for the response. Very easy to use and especially useful visualisations.

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.

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!

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

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

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/

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".

> 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.

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

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.

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....

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

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.

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 ?

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).

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.

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.

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)

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?

Every page & image (they’re all embedded SVGs) is generated from scratch using raw data on every request - with the number of languages and units supported it gets quite unwieldy when pre-generating (we had a mediocre experience w that on statisticalatlas.com).

In order to render in a timely fashion the sections & graphs are rendered in parallel on a decent sized instance.

A middle ground could just be adding some caching?

Typically 80-90% of our traffic is search engine bots crawling the site, which is not very amenable to caching. So even if we cached all user traffic the overall load wouldn't move much.

That said, it might make sense to cache to protect against load spikes on specific pages, but unfortunately those don't happen a whole lot.

hmm i wonder if a site like this would be a good candidate for cloudflare pages where bandwidth is unlimited (even though they have a 20K file limit). Then servers wouldn't need to serve any requests, and every time the source weather data is updated, you rebuild the files and push to cloudflare.

love the site despite the ads. who/what did you use for i18n?

Disclaimer: I work on Cloudflare Workers so I was thinking about how they might be able to drastically cut their costs.

Conceivably you could put up Cloudflare pages & put the assets behind a CDN with whatever TTL makes sense for how long the assets are expected to not expire for. I don't know how much that might save but certainly a cheap experiment to run.

If you wanted to experiment with a completely alternate architecture, generating them on-demand for each page's needs might be free/significantly cheaper on Cloudflare Workers. That might be a larger rewrite of the stack though and maybe worst case there are SVGs that take longer than 30s to fetch the underlying data + generate the graph.

That being said, I couldn't really tell which specific SVGs actually even needed to be generated realtime. It seemed like most of the assets would be largely ahead-of-time generated SVG w/ some localization that happens in the frontend but maybe the axis for the graphs/text within them are part of the SVG which could be something that's optimized by moving that out to HTML/JS land in the browser so that the underlying assets can have an improved cache efficiency. Certainly nothing on the front page seemed like it needed that since the map itself isn't localized & all of the heatmap summaries seem like they would be statically generated.

Not trying to push our products, just got nerd sniped by the problem.

[1] https://devclass.com/2021/04/14/cloudflare-goes-live-with-wo...

We embed the assets in page to have the code for each section in one place - there's a lot of little logic & math to figure out the phrases (they're not just formatted numbers), and both the text & the graphs rely on the same source data so might as well do all the work while you've got the data right there.

It also allows us to serve the entire page in a single request, and the gzipping of the SVGs works really well (~7x).

Keep in mind that every single graph would need 15 languages * typically 2 units = 15-30 versions. And each page has 10-20 graphs. And you can view each location by year/season/month/day, and the stations have histories sometimes going back to the 40s with a page for every single day (not indexed by Google). Not to mention the comparisons - we have some 150k locations that can be compared up to 5 at a time.

The combinatorial explosion makes pre-gen unattractive, and producing each graph in a separate request would also increase both server load and developer headaches.

If we re-architected the site today I'd probably do client side rendering of the charts, but the dev cost of making that change now would so far exceed any gains that it's not even funny.

(To be clear, the by far biggest cost of the service is developer time, not hosting cost, sorry if I implied otherwise)

wow what a gross underestimate on my part for how big this project is.

is there somewhere i can read more? did you know it would cost this much before you started? was 15 languages just for completeness i can’t imagine ads paying that well in some markets

Like a lot of our tools we developed the i18n solution entirely in-house.

Yeah, it's a weird decision.

Google has indexed >40M pages on the site, so we'd need a little exception on that 20k limit ;)

A developing alternative to advertisements is micropayments using HTTP 402 status and Bitcoin over the Lightning network. https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture

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.

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.

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... is the closest to a direct link

Please add celcius to the scale

EDIT: it can be changed at the top right

I can only see data on Celcius.

Maybe it depends on your location?

I'm in Germany

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

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

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/

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

So many ads.

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