Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

lukechampine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 201 posts

Re: Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

#61

Post by theli0nheart »

gav wrote: post #30
nemo1618 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I can probably incorporate humidity data without too much trouble. Is there a standard way to calculate a "feels like" temperature using humidity? btw, thanks for reminding me of the pleasant places map -- I think it must have been an unconscious influence on this.

The calculation from the NWS: https://www.weather.gov/epz/wxcalc_heatindex (see the linked PDF[1]) Given an air temperature (T) in °F and a relative humidity (rh). Indexheat = − 42.379 + (2.04901523 × T) + (10.14333127 × rh) − (0.22475541 × T × rh) − (6.83783×10−3×T^2) − (5.481717 × 10−2 × rh^2) + (1.22874 × 10−3 × T^2 × rh) + (8.5282×10−4 × T × rh^2) − (1.99×10−6 × T^2 × rh^2) [1] https://www.weather.gov/media/epz/w…

It would be nice if that document cited sources or provided a methodology for how these values were derived.

Re: Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

#62

Post by photochemsyn »

Such zones won't necessarily be very stable. Current climate trends point towards an increase in hot humid conditions in some areas, increased aridity and drought in others, and associated extreme weather conditions. If there's any one culprit to point to, it's the water vapor increase (forced in turn by the increase in atmospheric fossil CO2 and CH4). This also affects wet-bulb temperature (which sets an upper limit on outdoor activity):

https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/3151/too-hot-to-ha...

Climate-resistant design and construction is going to be a booming field in years to come. Termite-type underground construction, fire-resistant bunkers in dry zones, maybe flood-resistant floatable housing in flood zones, solar-powered AC units, etc. A lot of climates are more tolerable if you have a refuge to escape to.

Re: Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

#63

Post by bicx »

com2kid wrote: post #15

And this is why SF is so popular. It is a shame Florida never developed a huge tech hub, but Miami has plenty of other stuff going for it. (besides hurricanes) People don't get it, SF will be always popular because the climate is just that good. Seattle is a close #2 IMHO, but you have to be able to put up with 8 months of grey, which is a huge "but".

I moved to SF recently from Tennessee. It's been wonderful to have such pleasant weather year-round. Granted, it's not a tropical paradise, but you will survive with an optional light jacket in your backpack nearly all year.

The only other place that is now tempting me is San Diego.

Re: Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

#64

Post by tony_cannistra »

gotaquestion wrote: post #54
nemo1618 wrote: post #46

Hi all! Some background on the project: I want to build a house someday, and the first step is deciding where to build. I knew an interactive map like this would be useful, but after fiddling with leaflet.js for a while and googling for climate data, I felt a bit lost. So I decided to try something new: I hired a contractor on Upwork who had experience with map visualizations. They built an MVP within a few weeks, an…

Great job! Very responsive. I thought about making something like this too, years ago. I wanted to converge data from tornados, fault lines, flooding, and hurricaine probabilities. But then I got sucked into EVERY parameter I might want to consider, like air traffic (vortac lines), distance to power grid, UPS coverage, internet coverage, cellular coverage... and eventually the amount of data crushed my brain and the…

Not the dev, but these are probably hexagonal bins that were computed in spherical/conic space (e.g the Albers Equal Area or Lambert Conformal projections [0], which happen to also be the projections that NOAA distributes a lot of their data in) and projected to Web Mercator (which is the web maps projection). Usually when you do that you get bendy things.

[0]: https://psl.noaa.gov/data/narr/format.html

Re: Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

#65

Post by asdff »

bicx wrote: post #63
com2kid wrote: post #15

And this is why SF is so popular. It is a shame Florida never developed a huge tech hub, but Miami has plenty of other stuff going for it. (besides hurricanes) People don't get it, SF will be always popular because the climate is just that good. Seattle is a close #2 IMHO, but you have to be able to put up with 8 months of grey, which is a huge "but".

I moved to SF recently from Tennessee. It's been wonderful to have such pleasant weather year-round. Granted, it's not a tropical paradise, but you will survive with an optional light jacket in your backpack nearly all year. The only other place that is now tempting me is San Diego.

San Diego weather might be the best in the world. It feels like its physically impossible for it to be above 85 degrees from the prevailing ocean winds.

Re: Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

#66

Post by Symmetry »

nemo1618 wrote: post #28
silisili wrote: post #3

I like data like this - it reminds me of the pleasant places maps[1]. That said - you have to be wary of both types of maps because it doesn't take into account other potentially annoying factors. The biggest being humidity - there's a huge difference between 90 degree phoenix and 90 degree miami. Then there's rainfall, and one a lot of people don't think about - wind. To add - if you're thinking about seriously comp…

Hmm, I can probably incorporate humidity data without too much trouble. Is there a standard way to calculate a "feels like" temperature using humidity? btw, thanks for reminding me of the pleasant places map -- I think it must have been an unconscious influence on this.

You could use the dew point to combine humidity and temperature?

Re: Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

#67

Post by tony_cannistra »

nemo1618 wrote: post #29
rosetremiere wrote: post #27

I must say, it's frustrating clicking this link and landing on a page narrowed to the USA, and, to top it off, in Fahrenheit… Maybe a title change would be welcome.

Sorry! I'd love to extend this to other countries, but I wasn't sure where to get the data.

The ECMWF Reanalysis is a great option! https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/ecmwf-reanalysis-...

Re: Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

#68

Post by carapace »

nonameiguess wrote: post #32
com2kid wrote: post #15

And this is why SF is so popular. It is a shame Florida never developed a huge tech hub, but Miami has plenty of other stuff going for it. (besides hurricanes) People don't get it, SF will be always popular because the climate is just that good. Seattle is a close #2 IMHO, but you have to be able to put up with 8 months of grey, which is a huge "but".

SF is windy and overcast. Almost all of California except the mountain peaks and deserts has better climate.

Yeah, this. The folks above almost certainly live in the lee of Twin Peaks. Out here in the Western part of the city we have Winter and what I like to call the "Season of Cold Winds".

Re: Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

#69

Post by smeej »

Reading the comments makes me wonder if I'm the only one who would even be interested in this, but I really like variety, so I'd love to be able to be able to layer semitranslucent layers on top of each other.

It's probably way too much customization, but if I want somewhere that has at least 30 days that don't get over 30 degrees, as well as maybe 15 days above 90 degrees, I'd kind of have to have it open in two windows and compare locations myself, as opposed to being able to set which end of the color spectrum would be my "green" for each filter, layer them on top of each other, and just look for the greenest places.

But it seems like most people have a preference for consistent weather, so you're probably nailing your target market's wishes!

I already know I love where I live, too, so it'd be fun to look at where else might suit me, but I'm not making plans to move based on a hope of weather improvement.

Re: Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

#70

Post by carapace »

com2kid wrote: post #48
nonameiguess wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF is windy and overcast. Almost all of California except the mountain peaks and deserts has better climate.

I'm in Seattle, we are the US definition of overcast. 62% of our days have heavy could cover. SF doesn't even make the top 10 list of America's cloudiest cities. :)

But the clouds up there are gorgeous! Here we just get a grey blanket.
Post reply on HN