I have always enjoyed looking at weather statistics because it allows me to do a bit of armchair exploring from my laptop. There are plenty of great places online to find out about typical weather conditions if you already have a location in mind, but I always wanted a tool that would let me start with weather and then find matching locations. That's what I've set out to build here with City Weather Match. Why work backwards from weather to city? One great reason is that you can generate a list of ideal places to live or vacation based on weather preferrence. It's also just a fun way to explore and get a better sense of the country. Have you you ever wondered where there's snow on the ground at least half of the year, or maybe been curious about all of the places with a Mediterranean climate? Whatever your weather preferences and curiousities, City Weather Match makes it easy to explore.
The data for this site comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) 1981-2010 Climate Normals. This dataset contains weather information from that 30 year period for over 9800 weather stations across the country. There is an overwhelming amount of data collected in the Climate Normals, and my goal for this site was to take a small portion of that data and present it in a simple, searchable, and user friendly format. The pieces of data I chose to include and make searchable were those that I felt would best give a good general sense of a city's typical weather. This is obviously a subjective choice, and if you want to see data that is not included on the site just, scroll down to the "Suplementary Information" section on any location's detailed info page and you will find a link to all of the raw data for that location.
Although there are over 9800 stations in the Climate Normals, there are just under 4000 stations searchable on this site. This is due to the fact that many of the stations in the Climate Normals only have information on a particular type of weather condition, such as temperature or precipitation, but not a complete set of data. Stations were only included on this site if they had data for every weather value used by this site.
While the Climate Normals dataset is for a 30 year time span, not all stations have data for all 30 years. NOAA uses various methods to deal with these incomplete values. If you are using the data for scientific purposes it is important to know these details, but for the purposes of this site I have not taken years on record into account. If you are interested in how NOAA handles this issue, consult the references section on the NOAA 1981-2010 Climate Normals page.
While the search results are accurate, they can occasionally be misleading. Consider a large and geographically diverse city like Los Angeles. The temperature there can vary significantly depending on whether you are by the ocean, far inland, or near the mountains. No matter where a particular LA weather station is located, it cannot possibly be fully representative of the entire city. So, to get the best sense of an area's weather, consider these two suggestions:
My name is Michael Buckley, and I’m a web developer. My code for this site, which was built using React, is available to view on my Github account in the city-weather-match repository. Visit the repo to see how the site was built and to get additional information on the data that was used. Take a look at my Github profile to see some of the other projects I have built. If you would like to get in touch with me about this site or about your web development needs, you can contact me at contactmichaelbuckley@gmail.com.