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Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

lukechampine.com

81–90 of 201 posts

Re: Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

#81

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…

You have a great idea, hiring out someone on Upwork for an MVP that you could then run with or not. Wondering, what was the cost?

About $800 IIRC. I didn't shop around at all though.

Re: Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

#82
post #80

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…

Well...did it work for you? Did you find some spot where you're going to build a house?

Ha, no, not yet. Looking more closely at NC though. I want to have a nice mountain view, so maybe I need to incorporate topological data too somehow.

Re: Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

#83
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ultimately derived from here: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/18/7/1520-04...

The equation came later - the output of that article is just a table, and the equation was derived to be a nice fit over the table's values.

Re: Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

#84
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.

If taking comments from the peanut gallery...any chance on also limiting to "waking hours"? I mostly do not care what the temperature is at 3am, but it likely dramatically pushes down the low temperatures for a day.

Re: Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

#85
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.

So true. Driving up to SF from San Mateo often caused us to question the sanity of people paying so much to live in such a terrible micro-climate. We'd often be leaving clear and sunny, t-shirt and shorts weather, to enter what looked like an apocalyptic storm-chasers situation of cold, wet, doom and gloom.

Makes for great sailing year-round on the bay though!

Re: Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

#87
Those finding fault in this may be better served by the B6ppen climate classification, which is a global index that takes into account not just temperature but also rainfall and whether the rain is strongest in summer or winter.

Notably, it shows that the idyllic Mediterranean/Californian climate can also be found in parts of Western Australia, South Africa, and Chile.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classifica...

Re: Goldilocks Zone Finder – Find your ideal climate

#90

I've found Weather Spark to be a useful tool for researching ideal climates: https://weatherspark.com/ . It has detailed temperature breakouts by time of day and year, wind speed, humidity, rainfall, etc. One thing I've started to pay a lot more attention to is rainfall. The temperature in Southern California (where I currently live) is certainly pleasant, but that comes with the tradeoff of very limited rainfall, wh…

Currently SF is in a more severe drought than LA

Src: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonito...

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