Except for the isolated hex in Ontario, Canada. Note that this was probably built from the USCRN network [0] which has a research station in Egbert [1].
When I travel outside the US and have to discuss temperatures with people, or I'm talking to foreigners in the US, I convert to C in my head and use that.
It probably isn't that hard for you to just convert in your head.
There's never a need to use anything else than Celsius, in Europe. Ok, we do learn Kelvin in school but you wouldn't really use it in a normal conversation.
No, it's not, because it's not just a multiplication but also an addition. If I would live in the US for some time maybe I would develop a knack for it, but for now it's too much effort for something that only a few places use.
I don't use multiplication or division. I just know 0=32, 10=50, 20=68, 22=72(aka room temp), 30=86, and 40=104 (aka really hot). I just estimate from there.
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.
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.
Same. I'm moving from FL to the SW this year. People see our summer weather - 88hi, 78 low almost every day and think it's perfect. It's not, and it feels gross down to about 72 degrees because of the suffocating humidity.
I thought we had humid air in Montreal, literally living on an island, and to some extent it's true, but when I went down to Florida did I understand what humidity can make you feel like. Was there mid-August, some days were brutal.
Moved from Colorado (down to -40 in the winter) to east Texas as a kid. Went outside and was told it was mid 30F's. Did not believe they because it felt way colder.
These days I am used to it and wear short sleeves down to about 0 to -10F and watch the minds of everyone go WTF is he on. Had I don't know how many people try to donate me jackets while out walking. (Western AR now but it is the same as east Texas for climate.)
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.
I came to comment for this very reason. I care a lot about humidity. Ideally you could include both humidity (dew point is the best measure of humidity, btw) and feels like, but just the humidity would be enough.
But yeah, as others mentioned, rainfall, storms, cloudiness, etc, are all things that would be great to include.
Hey thanks, nice work btw. As others pointed out, heat index is a decent indicator I think.
Not to 'steal' ideas from the other site, but having that little year avg chart pop up on click is a really killer feature for showing which months are best. For example, I'd much rather live somewhere with 4 solid "uncomfortable" months and 8 solid comfortable, than somewhere with 2 on, 1 off.
Yep. Personally I'm interested in finding two locations: one with great weather throughout the summer, and one with great weather throughout the winter.
Don't know about Spokane, but summer would probably be somewhere on the West Coast, northern New England, or higher altitudes in the Southwest (e.g. Santa Fe). Winter is harder but, assuming I was trying to avoid snow, probably somewhere broadly in the desert Southwest.
Personally, I'm generally fine with snow and cold but but, yeah, if you're looking for fairly temperate climate year-round, it's mostly either California coastal areas or shifting between the lowlands/highlands in the Southwest. As you say, Flagstaff and somewhere in the Phoenix region would be a good example. Probably are examples in Colorado and New Mexico as well. Vegas in winter is also an option many like.
If taking comments from the peanut gallery...any chance on also limiting to "waking hours"? I mostly do not care what the temperature is at 3am, but it likely dramatically pushes down the low temperatures for a day.
That would be awesome, because right now it lists my city as ideal and I thought it sucked lol! Yes the temperature is not extreme but when the humidity is 600% it feels like a sauna
tl;dr This is a USA map to visualize average or min-max temperatures for areas roughly the diameter of Chicago. It colors the tiles based on the proportion of the selected interval (annual or a specific month). The data is from a US agency [0]. This way, you can see that Los Angeles, CA is 40-80° F 75% of the year and Salt Lake City, UT is in that range only 10%.
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?
I totally missed the month-by-month drop down. That helps, a lot, thanks.
Sorry for the overly critical tone of my comment, BTW. Sometimes the internet makes it hard for me to remember that real people work on stuff and are reading what you're saying about it.
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%).
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".
I lived in Redwood City for a few years. It was fantastic. We moved there from Tennessee, and after the first week we were like “wow, it has been clear blue skies every day this week!” After another four months with barely a cloud in the sky, it dawned on us that the climate really was quite incredible (although there are two seasons, “green” and “brown”, and the months are swapped from what they are in the southeast).
30 miles north in San Francisco it’s quite a bit cooler and less sunny though. I would drive into the fog every Saturday morning to visit the farmers market.
We’re back in Tennessee now and I forgot how bad my seasonal affective disorder gets. Apparently I crave sunshine.
What I find is that a total lack of clouds can make the sunlight feel overly bright and intense. The dryness can also lead to a bit of dust in the air.
This is pretty minor nitpicking overall, but the middle of the day can feel a little harsh for these reasons. The landscapes also get dried out.
This is more noticeable in the south bay than SF and thereabouts
> This is more noticeable in the south bay than SF and thereabouts
That's probably why Redwood City wins. In the summer, if you take 101 from the Presido to Gilroy, there's a spectrum from cool, damp, and foggy to hot and dry. The happy median is between Millbrae and Santa Clara, but you have a dial you can use to pick anything in that range.
Yeah, this. The folks above almost certainly live in the lee of Twin Peaks. Out here in the Western part of the city we have Winter and what I like to call the "Season of Cold Winds".
So true. Driving up to SF from San Mateo often caused us to question the sanity of people paying so much to live in such a terrible micro-climate. We'd often be leaving clear and sunny, t-shirt and shorts weather, to enter what looked like an apocalyptic storm-chasers situation of cold, wet, doom and gloom.
Makes for great sailing year-round on the bay though!
I live in Berkeley now and would love to sell my house and move some place cheaper, but the weather here is just incredible. The only thing I would like is warmer nights but I can’t seem to find that without 90 degree days.
I moved to SF recently from Tennessee. It's been wonderful to have such pleasant weather year-round. Granted, it's not a tropical paradise, but you will survive with an optional light jacket in your backpack nearly all year.
The only other place that is now tempting me is San Diego.
San Diego weather might be the best in the world. It feels like its physically impossible for it to be above 85 degrees from the prevailing ocean winds.
Another site you can use for this sort of thing is nomadlist[0]. Maybe get a general idea from this site and then use nomadlist to narrow it down to a city.
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.
My turn to be sorry! I had to blow some steam off and hadn't thought about the fact that the person behind the page might read my comment. Cheers on your work :)
defining a scale using the two transition points of a common naturally-occurring substance which is crucial to life and chemical processes makes a lot of sense.
Using a random human’s body temperature and a strange random mixture of chemicals as scale points does not make any sense. Might as well pick a random hot day and a random cold day and use that.
I'm not sure what you mean. I'm by no means an aficionado, but I've had coffee via automatic drip brew, Keurig, French press, even boiled some water in a small pot and had it like tea a few times. But I've never had to deal with the temperature personally, and that seems rather niche anyway.
I've found Weather Spark to be a far more 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.
If you could somehow incorporate sunshine (examples: # sunny days, daily hours of sun, % cloud cover, or something similar), that would be a phenomenal addition.
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.
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?
I honestly have no idea how the heck grid works haha. Maybe someone else can chime in.
The MVP site took >1 second to rerender when you dragged the slider. I got it down to a few dozen ms, which makes it a lot more fun to use. Pretty proud of that :)
The responsive, low-latency controls are definitely a pleasure!
Thank you for not making it a typical CRUD app that queries an overloaded 35MB database for a couple round trips every time you want to move a slider....
Not the dev, but these are probably hexagonal bins that were computed in spherical/conic space (e.g the Albers Equal Area or Lambert Conformal projections [0], which happen to also be the projections that NOAA distributes a lot of their data in) and projected to Web Mercator (which is the web maps projection). Usually when you do that you get bendy things.
I think it would be very hard to compare the risk from living near a fault line to living in a tornado zone. Tornadoes come nearly every year and it's pretty easy to quantify your risk of being in the path of one (and it's generally easy to minimize the risk -- listen for Tornado warnings and move to a shelter (build one if you have to)).
But the risk from earthquakes is much harder to quantify since they are so rare, hard to predict except in broad generalities, and the damage suffered is also hard to predict. You can try to reduce your risk by following good earthquake practices, but it's hard to quantify the risk reduction.
In my area, the earthquake risk is: “We estimate the probability of having a magnitude 9 earthquake in the next 50 years is about 10 to 14 percent”, but no one can say exactly where the earthquake will strike or what areas will suffer the most damage.
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.
Temperate is in the eye of the beholder :-) Pretty hot and humid in summer for my taste. That said, Asheville in particular often gets pretty highly ranked among small cities to live in and it's probably more comfortable in the summer than many other locations in the state.
In general, there's probably a fairly high correlation between places that are more pleasant to live in (across multiple dimensions) and housing prices. Jobs, of course, being another major factor.
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?
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 :)
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.
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?
I must be using the tool wrong because literally everywhere in the US is my Goldilocks zone which I'm certain is not the case. I set it to give me places where the minimum winter temperature is -5°C (23F) and max summer temperature is 35°C (95F) and every part of the map is coloured purple.
I think I just don't understand what to input to give the answer I want. I entered the typical minimum and maximum temperatures that I experience where I live now which is London, UK. Given that, I wouldn't expect the tool to tell me that the entire US has the same climate as London. I think it's because I'm used to a place where the extremes only last for a few days in each year and the rest of the time the temperature is pretty mild. Tolerating a 35°C day in the summer is not that hard when it only happens once every 5 years and you can go and drink cold drinks in the park.
I think it would be interesting to see the same map of the US but showing areas that never reach above or below the limits that you set.
You could probably pick a summer month in the month drop-down, at least for a pretty good approximation of 'areas that never go over X temperature,' since purple indicates 25-31 days inside your range.
This told me that I should live in Alaska, or on Mt. Washington. Unfortunately my ancestors came from your cloudy islands and we never adapted to all this horrible sunlight I guess.
And this my friends is why I live in San Diego! I really do think tech will take off in this area soon. Its (relatively for CA) on the cheaper side for housing and great for remote work.
While still somewhat cheaper than prime Bay Area real estate in absolute sense, the price edge in San Diego and North County has rapidly diminished in the last couple of years. Bidding is extremely aggressive and many homes in the more desirable areas go pending within a few days, frequently with many offers multiple $100k's above asking price. Saw one go $1M above asking recently. It's pretty bonkers.
Why is it great for remote work? The land is already developed and the undeveloped areas get the sweltering sun of socal without the cooling ocean breeze to balance it out. The "good climate" only lasts for a mile or so from shore from
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 guess people are different? I'm from a place where the difference between winter and summer is a lot, and as soon as I could moved to a place where the seasons are as even as possible. No need for change of clothing depending on the season and no risk of freezing in winter. Never been more happy, and the main reason for the move was indeed the weather.
Interesting, so this is something that you were like, actively conscious of as a source of unhappiness in your life? Like if someone had asked you, “what would you do to most improve your life?”, how high on the list would avoiding winter have been?
I live in New York, the delta is fairly significant, though I’m sure there’s worse places. I have heard of places in like e.g. remote Canada where it seems like life kinda just shuts down in the winter, I could definitely see that sucking.
Indeed. Between the end of autumn and middle of spring, my life basically shut down and I became borderline depressed for that period every year, until the sun started showing up and you no longer only had 4-5 hours of sunlight per day anymore.
And when I moved to a place with more even seasons (and more sunlight overall), I no longer experience this seasonal depression, so yeah, I'd definitely put "good weather" close to the top on the list on how to improve my life, and subsequently, it's a strong indicator on where I can live in the world.
I've lived in NE all my life, and I certainly enjoy all the seasons, but the summers are just a bit too long and hot and the winters are just a bit too long and cold. I think the perfect climate would be something like "New England, but spring/fall last as long as summer/winter, and vice versa."
Any chance this can be made to work in countries besides the United States? The weather over here in Malaysia has been going insane - imagine 2 months worth in rain happening in 2 days.
In the lightning-unlikely chance that I had my druthers, I would go for something like a Koppen Cfb climate, probably near the Hoh rainforest: moderate temperatures, highly overcast, and quite damp. But not near a great number of people.
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.
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.
Ha I didn't know it had a special name, I found out about Medellin's climate when I was looking for a place which had the consistency of Singapore's climate but about 5C cooler. I found that Addis Ababa and Kigali are pretty similar, and though it's a couple of degrees cooler Quito's climate seems quite appealing too.
I've been to none of these cities so I've no idea what they're like to visit or live in, but when I'm walking my dog in the morning and it's -1C on the 12th of March my mind wanders :-)
I’m discovering my secret (even to myself) ulterior motive in posting the above may have been to identify a cohort of fellow HN’ers looking for high quality of life per cost of living areas suitable for remote (co?)working.
I’m currently PNW lifestyle, but planning a lengthy expedition around South America starting later this year; email in bio for anyone still reading this thread and wanting to keep in touch.
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.
It seems the data is computed on a grid, so TIF files are the raw dataset. They're georeferenced, desktop Google Earth can handle them imported as a "super overlay".
I emphatically disagree, but I did notice that the full range of temperatures in the NOAA dataset is -30 to 120. I've updated the site to use that range.
Plant zones seem very primitive to me, AFAICT based only on the maximum sustained cold. So for instance Duluth has a relatively higher hardiness zone rating than some areas around it, despite having a very narrow growing period, simply because in the depth of winter it doesn't get QUITE as cold due to Lake Superior. But most of the year it's quite a bit colder places around it due to that same lake!
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!
Another reason multiple temperature ranges are needed. Winter is lovely for variety and especially for killing the bugs. But too much winter can get tedious.
Countries which use Fahrenheit: the United States, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, Liberia, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands.
Please add a Celsius switch! Thanks from the rest of the World.
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.
Define "livable climate". Are Seasons too much to handle? Also, aren't you at risk for an insane 9.0 earthquake (was so when I live in Seattle I believe).
I love it. Some more dimensions that would be nice to have: precipitation and unfortunately, air pollution index, especially in the west during summer.
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. ;-)
Having stayed in Australia and the Middle East for a while, high temperatures like 40 C are very livable when it's dry. While 32 C can be terrible indoors where it's humid. My home/office is loaded with dehumidifiers.
I wonder if it was possible to create geospatial database of temperature, humidity, sunshine times, population density, air quality etc and then do queries to find regions of interest.
I remember there was a site called "Teleport" for planning where to move to (climate, noise, good neighborhoods, etc) that I used last time I moved around in the Bay, but it got acquihired and shut down. Hopefully someone makes another one.
Very nice and, like other commenters, I really like the responsiveness.
Small bit: on an iPhone XS Max, the slider couldn’t be set to 20°F or 85°F. Making the control box slightly wider would probably allow that, but it took nothing away from the practical usability, of course.
Since my job allows me to work remotely, I based a large part of my decision to move by states that were in grow zone 6 and above in the US. I have a pretty good idea of where all those places are now. Surprisingly depending on where you are in the States, moving down one state south doesn’t change the weather appreciably
I love the map. I love the responsiveness. I have done things with Leaflet and geoJSON and have always wanted to do hexagons. How did you convert the temperature data to hexagons? Or, more specifically, create the tesselation of hexagons? (I would like to do something similar for Australia where I live)
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