Find Cities with Similar Climates | Hacker News Reader

Find Cities with Similar Climates

mikemcbrearty.com

38 pointsericedge45 comments

I tried to search for my city and got back:

  EAST LONDON, SOUTH AFRICA
  LONDON AIRPORT, CANADA

I would have thought London (UK) might have got a mention.

When I type "København" it responds with an empty page. It seems like any non-ascii character makes the page crash.

It doesn't have "Copenhagen", only "Koebenhavn" which nobody uses.

One of the cities it gives for Estonia is "Pjarnu", for Pärnu.

But then it also thinks the capital is "Tallin", rather than Tallinn.

Seconded.

No results for Manila, Kuala Lumpur, or Singapore either

No results for Prague and Dublin. For Vienna, if found Vienna, VA, USA, not Vienna, Austria.

Try the local names. Praha, Wien, and some unknown mystical name the Dubliners use.

Praha and Wien work, Baile Atha Cliath (local mystical name for Dublin) doesn't.

This city search is the worst one I've ever used. Devs, please test your sites, even the toy projects.

I typed in 3 large US cities and got 3 "no results found". Google map API is your friend.

I tried London, but it only gave me a place in South Africa or a canadian airport.

Nice idea. I like the clean interface and it's very responsive. Nice comparison feature as well. I think you need some kind of canonical name resolution though.

For example, searching for 'Moscow' returns nothing -- but it is found as 'Moskva'. Also, nothing is returned for 'Nairobi', but it's there as 'Jomo Kenyatta International' which is their airport. Not exactly obvious.

Overall very nice work.

Can you just list the cities you actually support instead of masquerading with a search box?

Is it only showing airports because the dataset uses climate data from aeronautical sources?

Do a search for 'South Africa' - the cities it returns are all small cities which are just big enough to have airports. In the cases of places like new york, only the airport is returned.

I'm just guessing here, but possibly this is a database of geographical locations with a population figure attached. The author has probably swapped 'only show cities with greater than X population' with 'only show cities with less than X population'. Airports would have very low population, and that's why there are so many airports. It also doesn't handle non-ASCII characters.

It's a guess, anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Weather_Service

in the US the NWS / NOAA operates weather stations at airports, wouldn't be surprised if other countries have similar programs.

my hometown has a much larger population than the next one over, but the next one over is listed because there's an airport there.

You missed my point maybe - the fact that your hometown is bigger and not listed is exactly the problem. There are a number of small cities listed that do not have airports also. The key is that a listed city either lists as 'airport' (population 0), or is a very small city (low population). So my point is that the filtering is probably backwards, and it's filtering out big cities instead of filtering out small ones.

Maybe. ;)

Might it not be likely that an application dependent on weather data is actually limited to locations for which weather data is available, regardless of population?

Nice hack. The visualization is well done.

Feature idea: It would be cool if you could sketch the min/max temperatures and rainfall you'd like for your ideal city, and it would tell you what's close to that.

What I really like about the search, is that it accounts for seasons on different hemispheres. E.g. it returns Lisboa and Cadiz as places similar to Sydney. Even though the months with hot weather are different in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

As a side note - clicking the name of a place shows an overlay in the graph. It was not obvious at first; the names are in black.

I must confess I didn't expect the number of curt "the search is inadequate" responses; I posted this because it solved a particular problem I've been curious about for some time, and does a great job of displaying the data in a way that's useful to me. I found the graph display quite handy--using the same scaling on all pages allows me to easily compare different locations in different browser tabs, but the data is displayed simply enough that I'm not overwhelmed with sparklines like I am at other climate sites.

That said, I'd love to see more details about the underlying dataset; given the way the search works it appears to be a SQL database, so I assume it's public data from somewhere?

I put this site together, glad it's useful for you. The graphs are my take on climatographs.

The data is from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Climatic Data Center, see http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/. The dataset has good coverage of the US, but as people have pointed out, there are gaps in many places, such as the UK. The comparison is based on the monthly average max and min temperatures.

If you can't find any cities how are you going to evaluate the rest of the features? I'm not going to play "guess the city".

Interesting.

As far as I can tell though, it doesn't seem to account for humidity, pollution or wind patterns. The former is especially important for hot climates (or times of the year) since when it comes to comfort, hot dry >> hot humid.

Yeah it doesn't account for a lot of stuff. I'm in a Mediterranean climate here and it's suggesting a lot of places that are very far from that. If it's supposed to be used for plant growing related purposes it's not going to be very useful.

Results found for: amsterdam

* No results found.

Great product!

That doesn't sound very nice...

I'm getting a blank page on Safari. http://mikemcbrearty.com/climate/search?q=Vitória

Having trouble with "http://mikemcbrearty.com/climate/search?q=moscow"

Trying to figure out the point of this. It's counter intuitive to how most people think. If I want to move, chances are, I want to move somewhere different than the climate I'm already in. Same thing for vacation. I'm still trying to find a reason I want to go somewhere with the same climate as the one I'm currently in.

Perhaps a better idea would be to show places which are completely opposite of the one you're already in.

For me it was the opposite: I choose where I live and I prefer mild climates like southern California in the fall, or Chicago in September. I'd love to see a fully-blossomed climate-view during the year, to city-jump during the most liveable seasons (avoid Chicago Nov-April or July-August for example)

I tried searching for my city (Tromsø), and got an absolutely blank page back.

At least tell me "City not found".

It looks like it works if you write it 'Tromso'. But you have to write Copenhagen as 'Koebenhavn', so it seems inconsistent in handling the ø.

Overall, this is pretty alright, though I'm looking at the climate results for Boston in the summertime right now, and as sweat pours down my face I really really wish that 25°C was the average temperature around here in June-July.

Why are the colours so similar?

What about a link to see cities that are the most opposite?

It doesn't know about London?

    Results found for: london

    EAST LONDON, SOUTH AFRICA
    LONDON AIRPORT, CANADA

Nice Project.

Bug: as soon as you enter mon ASCI Charaters in the search, it will return a blank page, tried: münchen (munich), 東京 (Tokyo).

Some sort of filter-by-country, or even just more than 10 results would be a nice addition.

And a 'minimum population' control.

Adding in maps would also be interesting - seeing where these different "similar" places on the planet are.

Nice idea. Though I think "hours of sunlight" is probably more important than "precipitation.

Doesn't find Tampere, Finland.

I couldn't find Kathmandu, Nepal on it. Thanks, pretty cool site!

Cool, although the recall leaves something to be desired.

Seems to only show airpots.

something missing from the title "some cities"

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