Finding the best climate, with technology?

August 26, 2017 5:56 PM

Is there an online tool that lets me find locations in the US (or world) that meet searchable climate criteria?

Ex: I want a list of zipcodes/cities where the temperature is between 10F-50F between Oct and Feb, has 12" snowfall avg, and between April and August the temp is between 50F and 90F, with between 2" and 5" rain. Wind is low year round.

I know the data is out there, but instead of raiding some public CSV data and writing my own tool to do this, I figure this searchable interface may be a thing that exists?

posted by hanoixan to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Trouble is, almost everywhere has its own peculiarities, and many areas have very localised climate. For example, some places are prone to storm surges, or heatwaves, or hurricanes, or earthquakes (do they count?). 12" snowfall annually? Sounds pretty grim :)
posted by tillsbury at 7:32 PM on August 26, 2017

You might be interested in the answers to this old question of mine. Preview: nothing quite like what we're asking for turned up then. (This would be a great project for a developer, and I hope someone takes it on!)
posted by daisyace at 5:19 AM on August 27, 2017

You might want to take a look at the Köppen climate classification system, which categorizes a region's climate according to precipitation and temperature (both yearly averages and monthly variations.) The categories are pre-set, so you couldn't slice the data quite as finely as you're describing; but they're relatively fine-grained, and you might be able to figure out one or two categories that match your criteria the best.
posted by Johnny Assay at 7:31 AM on August 27, 2017

City Data has an advanced search tool that lets you filter cities based on up to ten criteria, including some climate criteria.
posted by kevinbelt at 9:48 AM on August 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

How about climatefinder.com ?
posted by weatherman at 8:11 AM on September 5, 2017