Climatology

Established: July 10, 2014

Climatology was an app developed by HXD in partnership with Microsoft Research’s Computational Science team based in Cambridge. It gave you seasonal climate information for absolutely anywhere on Earth including temperature, rain, sunniness and humidity. Whether finding where are the warm, dry places to go on holiday in December, or avoiding rain for your wedding, to finding out what the climate is like in Kazakhstan in April, Climatology allowed you to discover the information you want.

The Climatology app took data from a pre-existing climate system called Fetch Climate, which aggregates many different sources of climate data, and presented it all in a map-based interface that allowed users to quickly navigate by place, by time of year and by climate condition. So, it was a weather app, but one that allowed for year-long planning based on historical and modeled data, rather than just the next few days or weeks. Its simple interface made different sorts of weather easily accessible and browsable by anyone.

Using the app you could browse a map of the world that was overlayed with data about temperature, precipitation, sunlight and humidity. This was colour coded, showing the average condition for the current month, plus an upper and lower band. Users could browse quickly through the months of an average year, seeing the conditions change on the map.

Typical planning questions that Climatology answered included:

When does it get too hot in Florida to comfortably visit Disney World?
When does it warm up in Paris?
When is monsoon season in India?

Climatology was developed and shipped during a two week hackfest with the Computational Science team in 2014.