
Find Cities with Similar Climates - ericedge
http://mikemcbrearty.com/climate/
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sandbags
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.

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silvestrov
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.

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

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

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

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

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dan1234
I tried London, but it only gave me a place in South Africa or a canadian
airport.

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dean
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.

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

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

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RyanZAG
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.

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beachstartup
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Weather_Service](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.

~~~
RyanZAG
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. ;)

~~~
jasondenizac
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?

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graue
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.

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peterjs
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.

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ericedge
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?

~~~
mmcb
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/](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.

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gvkv
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.

~~~
HNJohnC
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.

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DoubleCluster
Results found for: amsterdam

* No results found.

Great product!

~~~
frozenport
That doesn't sound very nice...

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

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frozenport
Having trouble with
"[http://mikemcbrearty.com/climate/search?q=moscow"](http://mikemcbrearty.com/climate/search?q=moscow")

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at-fates-hands
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.

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marquis
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)

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

At least tell me "City not found".

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_delirium
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.

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the1213
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.

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Siecje
Why are the colours so similar?

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

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ketralnis
It doesn't know about London?

    
    
        Results found for: london
    
        EAST LONDON, SOUTH AFRICA
        LONDON AIRPORT, CANADA

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replax
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).

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c54
Some sort of filter-by-country, or even just more than 10 results would be a
nice addition.

And a 'minimum population' control.

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

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

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nawitus
Doesn't find Tampere, Finland.

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

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jamesaguilar
Cool, although the recall leaves something to be desired.

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benblack86
Seems to only show airpots.

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lesslaw
something missing from the title "some cities"

