How we build Weather Story

Last updated 2026-05-10. Maintainer: Brian Tighe (btighe428@gmail.com).

What this site is

Weather Story is an almanac-style weather reference for U.S. cities and ZIP codes. Each city page combines a current forecast, 30-year climate normals, a frost-aware planting calendar, microseason context, and a short FAQ. The goal is a useful, durable reference — not a real-time weather radar or a news site.

Pages are server-rendered from public datasets. Numeric content (temperatures, precipitation, frost dates, ZIP boundaries) comes directly from the sources cited below; the prose around those numbers is generated programmatically and, for the highest-traffic cities, edited with a language model under the rules in the editorial section.

Data sources

Climate normals (1991–2020). Open-Meteo Climate API — monthly mean temperature, precipitation totals, and rainy-day counts, served free for non-commercial use under CC BY 4.0.
Köppen-Geiger climate zones. Approximated via NOAA NCEI U.S. Climate Regions and the public Beck et al. (2018) classification (Sci. Data 5:180214).
Cities and ZIPs. SimpleMaps US Cities and US ZIPs (CC BY 4.0). Population, coordinates, county, and ZIP membership.
Hardiness zones and frost dates. Frost dates are derived from latitude bins as a coarse approximation; for the authoritative per-ZIP zone we direct readers to the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map.

Editorial standards

Every city page follows the same scaffold (climate intro, year-in-weather table, planting calendar, FAQ, regional context, microseason). The numeric tables are programmatic: the same source dataset always produces the same numbers.

The prose around those tables is held to three rules: cite a source for every number; never introduce facts not present in the source (no invented landmarks, neighborhoods, or events); and write in a register that respects the reader's time — short sentences, concrete nouns, no marketing filler.

We do not personalize, A/B test, or hide content from users that we show crawlers. The HTML you see in your browser is the same HTML we send to Googlebot.

Microseasons

Weather Story uses the Japanese shichijūni kō (七十二候) — a calendar that divides the solar year into seventy-two five-day windows — as the editorial backbone for "what season is it, really?" on every city page. The system was imported from China to Japan in the eighth century and codified in 1685 by the Edo-period almanac Honchō Shichijūni-kō. Each kō is a tiny weather observation: the bush warblers starting to sing ( kōō kenkan su, February 9–13), the bamboo shoots emerging ( takenoko shōzu, May 16–20), the rotting grass becoming fireflies ( kusaretaru kusa hotaru to naru, June 11–15).

The Japanese kō names are universal — they describe a single five-day window of the solar year — but what that window looks like on the ground varies by climate. Each city page renders the reading from the climate region that matches its location. The same calendar window, read through different ecologies, is visible side-by-side on the dedicated kō pages at /microseasons.

Update cadence

Forecast and current conditions: re-fetched every 30 minutes.
Climate normals: refreshed when a new 30-year window is available (next: 2031, when the 1991–2020 window rolls over).
Page composition: updated as editorial standards evolve.

Corrections