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Originally Posted by zappa1
Travel Weather Averages (Weatherbase)
Here is a site for just about any weather related stats you want. Browse the country, pick a state, select a city or town from the list and you can spend lots of time going over all the data available. It's pretty cool. And there are also other sites to browse. This isn't the only one. Check it out. Have fun.
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Thanks for linking this site! It has a BOATLOAD of weather data - this is far and away one of the best weather data sites I've ever seen.
An interesting feature is the daily averages breakout - two pie charts with a % breakout of every kind of weather condition possible, including differentiation in precipitation (rain, thunderstorms, drizzle, showers, etc.) as well as sky conditions (clear, scattered clouds, cloudy, overcast, etc.) - and wind direction breakout from every possible direction on the compass.
It would be a TON of work to compile this - but I believe using this data it would be possible to derive something pretty accurate. As I am semi-retired due to health issues - I might have to see if I can work up a test spreadsheet to see what the data looks like (and to see how long it would take to compile it). It would all be manual input - but pretty simple to do in Excel. Taking a sample month (say August) and sample location (the Bronx) - perhaps I can compile and calculate an average number to plug into the game that would accurately reflect the actual weather trends. According to the site, this section is based on 21 years of data (the National Weather Service typically uses a 30-year block of time to calculate 'norms'/'averages') - a 21-year average should be sufficient to derive a reliable average.
We'll see what it looks like. The overall 'monthly' number would simply be an average of the compiled daily numbers.
Given that it looks possible to differentiate between weather types, particularly precipitation types, I would love to see the developers work something like this into the game. Right now "rain" is simply a single category of "rain" ... it would be great to see the game differentiate between long-duration rain events vs. short-duration events (showers vs thunderstorms)... it would add a lot of realism to the game.
Something else - knowing the % of time skies are either cloudy or overcast (according to the weather data) vs the % of time there is precipitation could drive how often precip falls when the game reports 'cloudy' sky conditions. Right now it appears that 100% of the time in the game, if the sky conditions start off 'cloudy' - at some point in the game it transitions to 'rain'. That doesn't happen in real life. Many times games are played under a heavy overcast without a drop of rain falling. Or generally cloudy skies (high clouds for example) - with no rain.
This could be an interesting project.