Searching for the ideal climate

August 8, 2009 4:19 PM

I am interested in searching for global locales based on weather: avg temperature, rainfall, days of sunshine etc. Can anyone recommend such a web site? Barring that, what websites are best to review these weather characteristics over time for a given locale?
posted by dougiedd to Science & Nature (6 answers total)

sounds like a job for Wolfram
posted by trev at 4:55 PM on August 8, 2009

If you've got access to Mathematica, you can do all sorts of manipulations through their weather data. I imagine (but haven't checked) it's the same data that underlies Wolfram Alpha 'knowledge computation', as they would insist on putting it.
posted by StephenF at 5:31 PM on August 8, 2009

Wikipedia typically has weather averages for cities, as in this Philadelphia page. Another good source is the Weather Channel website, which lists averages for cities. Just type in the city you want and look for the averages button. You'll get a plot like this.
posted by Aanidaani at 5:41 PM on August 8, 2009

I think the term you want to search for is "climate normals". These are statistics gathered from long-term weather data, and represent typical weather conditions. I found a bunch of sets just by using that search term.
posted by scruss at 7:29 PM on August 8, 2009 [1 favorite]

Wundergound has a lot of historical weather data.
posted by transporter accident amy at 1:55 AM on August 9, 2009

Response by poster: I can not configure a suitable Wolfram search query: can someone help?
posted by dougiedd at 2:32 PM on August 9, 2009