About WeatherJourney
What is WeatherJourney?
WeatherJourney is a free climate-history tool. For thousands of cities it shows today's conditions, the day's high and low compared with the long-term average, monthly climate averages, all-time records and the long-term warming trend on a single page, with no accounts and no tracking.
Why we built it
Most weather sites only look at the next few days. Climate context is buried in PDFs or paywalled databases: how today compares with the last 80 years, whether your city is warming, which months are wettest. We wanted one fast, readable page per city that anyone can use.
Data sources
- ECMWF ERA5: Daily temperature, rainfall, wind and solar radiation since 1940 from the ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis, distributed via the Copernicus CDS
- Open-Meteo: Current conditions and short-range forecast from Open-Meteo's open-source weather software, which we run on our own server with the forecast data Open-Meteo publishes openly. Project site: open-meteo.com
- GeoNames: City names, coordinates and population from geonames.org (CC BY 4.0)
- IP2Location LITE: Coarse server-side IP geolocation (city level) to suggest a nearby city via the free lite.ip2location.com
- Yr/NRK: Weather condition symbols by Yr/NRK (CC BY 4.0)
How it works
For every covered city we ingest the full ERA5 daily series back to 1940 and compute climatology, monthly averages and trend statistics. Live conditions and the short forecast come from Open-Meteo. Daily values are aggregated over the UTC calendar day for every city, not the local day: monthly and yearly statistics are unaffected, but a single day's high, low or rainfall can be shifted by a few hours for cities far from Greenwich. Pages are generated server-side and cached for speed. A few dozen cities are deliberately left out: in steep valleys and on some coasts the ~28 km ERA5 cell cannot represent the place, and the model's temperature or rainfall is far from what is observed there.
Free and privacy-first
WeatherJourney is free to use. There are no user accounts, no tracking cookies, and no third-party advertising scripts at this time. The site may run non-intrusive ads in the future to cover hosting and data costs.
Contact
WeatherJourney is an independent project by SimpleMeteo. Contact us →