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Show HN: A world map of 24x365 average temperature “fingerprints”

weatherspark.com

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Re: Show HN: A world map of 24x365 average temperature “fingerprints”

#71

Post by jacobn »

sails wrote: post #70
jacobn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spring in NYC is Mar-May: https://weatherspark.com/s/23912/0/Average-Spring-Weather-in... Spring in Sydney is Sep-Nov: https://weatherspark.com/s/144544/0/Average-Spring-Weather-i... But maybe you meant something else?

Yes I meant when comparing, per below, Sydney is 20-30 degrees celcius in "Winter". Not sure why that view defaults with the seasonal labels. https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/0/23912~149466/Comparison... This second link gives a better view https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/23912~149466/Comparison-o...

Ah, we use the first location's view of the world, so [0] does Mar-May, and [1] does Sep-Nov

[0]: https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/0/23912~149466/Comparison...

[1]: https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/0/149466~23912/Comparison...

We've added double-x-axis for comparisons to the todo-list.

Re: Show HN: A world map of 24x365 average temperature “fingerprints”

#72

Post by sharps_xp »

jacobn wrote: post #68
jhugo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A middle ground could just be adding some caching?

Typically 80-90% of our traffic is search engine bots crawling the site, which is not very amenable to caching. So even if we cached all user traffic the overall load wouldn't move much. That said, it might make sense to cache to protect against load spikes on specific pages, but unfortunately those don't happen a whole lot.

hmm i wonder if a site like this would be a good candidate for cloudflare pages where bandwidth is unlimited (even though they have a 20K file limit). Then servers wouldn't need to serve any requests, and every time the source weather data is updated, you rebuild the files and push to cloudflare.

love the site despite the ads. who/what did you use for i18n?

Re: Show HN: A world map of 24x365 average temperature “fingerprints”

#73

Post by sails »

jacobn wrote: post #71
sails wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I meant when comparing, per below, Sydney is 20-30 degrees celcius in "Winter". Not sure why that view defaults with the seasonal labels. https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/0/23912~149466/Comparison... This second link gives a better view https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/23912~149466/Comparison-o...

Ah, we use the first location's view of the world, so [0] does Mar-May, and [1] does Sep-Nov [0]: https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/0/23912~149466/Comparison... [1]: https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/0/149466~23912/Comparison... We've added double-x-axis for comparisons to the todo-list.

Fair enough, thanks for the response. Very easy to use and especially useful visualisations.

Re: Show HN: A world map of 24x365 average temperature “fingerprints”

#75

Post by vlovich123 »

yosito wrote: post #43
vlovich123 wrote: post #25

Would it be possible to animate this over time to visualize the impact of global warming?

You wouldn't be able to visualize the impact of global warming with this data/representation. Global warming is roughly 1 degree celcius over the past couple hundred years, as a global average. This visualization only shows temperatures in 6 degree increments in specific locations. The historical data in many locations probably isn't even enough to capture that 1 degree average change, and there would be so much nois…

Neat, but those visualizations seem like an unrealistic exaggeration for dramatic effect. I would assume that people would generally respond in some way to large scale flooding as they've done in the past, whether building levies or creating artificial land & rebuilding on top to try to stem the problem. Certainly an expensive endeavor that'll continue to create drastic inequalities across the globe & it'll create a lot of humanitarian crises, but it would genuinely surprise me that 10 years from now Google Earth images will actually look similar to these predictions even if we don't change our path.

I think the better way to message this is "here's the cost of what it'll cost your government to keep this city running over the next 10 years/here's how much money you'll lose if you don't start getting ready".

Re: Show HN: A world map of 24x365 average temperature “fingerprints”

#76

Post by vlovich123 »

sharps_xp wrote: post #72
jacobn wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically 80-90% of our traffic is search engine bots crawling the site, which is not very amenable to caching. So even if we cached all user traffic the overall load wouldn't move much. That said, it might make sense to cache to protect against load spikes on specific pages, but unfortunately those don't happen a whole lot.

hmm i wonder if a site like this would be a good candidate for cloudflare pages where bandwidth is unlimited (even though they have a 20K file limit). Then servers wouldn't need to serve any requests, and every time the source weather data is updated, you rebuild the files and push to cloudflare. love the site despite the ads. who/what did you use for i18n?

Disclaimer: I work on Cloudflare Workers so I was thinking about how they might be able to drastically cut their costs.

Conceivably you could put up Cloudflare pages & put the assets behind a CDN with whatever TTL makes sense for how long the assets are expected to not expire for. I don't know how much that might save but certainly a cheap experiment to run.

If you wanted to experiment with a completely alternate architecture, generating them on-demand for each page's needs might be free/significantly cheaper on Cloudflare Workers. That might be a larger rewrite of the stack though and maybe worst case there are SVGs that take longer than 30s to fetch the underlying data + generate the graph.

That being said, I couldn't really tell which specific SVGs actually even needed to be generated realtime. It seemed like most of the assets would be largely ahead-of-time generated SVG w/ some localization that happens in the frontend but maybe the axis for the graphs/text within them are part of the SVG which could be something that's optimized by moving that out to HTML/JS land in the browser so that the underlying assets can have an improved cache efficiency. Certainly nothing on the front page seemed like it needed that since the map itself isn't localized & all of the heatmap summaries seem like they would be statically generated.

Not trying to push our products, just got nerd sniped by the problem.

[1] https://devclass.com/2021/04/14/cloudflare-goes-live-with-wo...

Re: Show HN: A world map of 24x365 average temperature “fingerprints”

#77

Post by yosito »

vlovich123 wrote: post #75
yosito wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't be able to visualize the impact of global warming with this data/representation. Global warming is roughly 1 degree celcius over the past couple hundred years, as a global average. This visualization only shows temperatures in 6 degree increments in specific locations. The historical data in many locations probably isn't even enough to capture that 1 degree average change, and there would be so much nois…

Neat, but those visualizations seem like an unrealistic exaggeration for dramatic effect. I would assume that people would generally respond in some way to large scale flooding as they've done in the past, whether building levies or creating artificial land & rebuilding on top to try to stem the problem. Certainly an expensive endeavor that'll continue to create drastic inequalities across the globe & it'll create a…

> it would genuinely surprise me that 10 years from now Google Earth images will actually look similar to these predictions

The interface says that these are predictions of sea level rise several centuries from now.

Re: Show HN: A world map of 24x365 average temperature “fingerprints”

#78

Post by foota »

jacobn wrote: post #67
foota wrote: post #52

It's a little weird looking at e.g., Central Africa and seeing no maps. Maybe they chose locations based on population? Either way, would be nice to fix this, as there are places with data available.

We show temperature fingerprints for all the weather stations in our network, you can find links to the data sources here: https://weatherspark.com/y/147186/Average-Weather-at-John-F....

I think something is missing here, this[1] is a zoomed in image of Africa, there are clearly stations in DRC and Angola, but no snapshots show there.

https://imgur.com/a/KmkVoUJ

Re: Show HN: A world map of 24x365 average temperature “fingerprints”

#80

Post by jacobn »

sharps_xp wrote: post #72
jacobn wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically 80-90% of our traffic is search engine bots crawling the site, which is not very amenable to caching. So even if we cached all user traffic the overall load wouldn't move much. That said, it might make sense to cache to protect against load spikes on specific pages, but unfortunately those don't happen a whole lot.

hmm i wonder if a site like this would be a good candidate for cloudflare pages where bandwidth is unlimited (even though they have a 20K file limit). Then servers wouldn't need to serve any requests, and every time the source weather data is updated, you rebuild the files and push to cloudflare. love the site despite the ads. who/what did you use for i18n?

Like a lot of our tools we developed the i18n solution entirely in-house.

Yeah, it's a weird decision.

Google has indexed >40M pages on the site, so we'd need a little exception on that 20k limit ;)

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