About VSWeather

Who makes this

Hi, I'm Ethan Monk. As someone who has moved around a lot, living in different localities for months to years at a time, I realized the climate (specifically the number of sunny days) of places matters a lot to me. After trying to find a simple website that compared climate between two cities, I identified a gap: a simple, shareable, quick-to-digest interface to compare the weather of two places did not exist. Preexisting websites and apps cater more towards in-depth analysis versus the quick and to-the-point solution I was looking for.

I've been a data engineer for over a decade, so I jumped into the data and built VSWeather. This shapes VSWeather in that all work goes into the data first. Accuracy in all the numbers published on this site is of the utmost importance. Hopefully this website is as helpful to others as it is to me.

What makes it different

Comparing the climate of two places sounds easy and is not. Weather sites answer what it is like today, and climate tables answer one city at a time. The useful question is usually relative: is one city really grayer than the other, how much snowier is this town than that one, which of two places gets more real summer. VSWeather is built to answer that question directly: pick two places and see their 30 year records side by side.

The other difference is under the hood: the underlying data deserved more careful handling than it usually gets. Modern weather models are remarkable, but a model grid cell can misrepresent a specific town, and most sites publish those numbers as they come. Building the verification program behind this site turned out to be the real project; the comparison pages are the part you see.

How the numbers are kept honest

Every figure is a 1991 to 2020 climate normal computed from daily weather history, then checked against NOAA station measurements before it ships. Where the weather grid misrepresents a real place, the published number is anchored to measured records, and two release gates block any dataset whose numbers drift from station truth. The full method, including what I cannot verify and refuse to show, is on the data sources page.

Get in touch

Questions, corrections, and problem reports are welcome: email hello@vsweather.com. If a number looks wrong for a place you know well, please say so. Reports like that get checked against station records, and confirmed errors get corrected and documented.