How it works

The records

Every day in your sculpture is a real observation from NOAA’s GHCN-Daily archive — the Global Historical Climatology Network, the same quality-assured, public-domain dataset climate scientists work from. For each day we read four things: the high temperature, the low, precipitation, and snowfall.

We keep only weather stations that have watched the sky for thirty years or more and are still reporting today — mostly airports and long-running observatories. A few times a year we fetch the fresh archive, pack each station’s full history into a single compressed file, and publish those files as static data. The product itself never calls NOAA; your browser only ever downloads one prepared file.

Your hometown, honestly

When you name a town, we find the nearest long-record station — often the airport a little way out. That is the sky that was actually written down, so that is the sky we show; a sculpture labeled with your town is drawn from the closest station’s records, not interpolated weather. If the nearest station’s records begin after your birth, we stitch its early years from an older neighbor when one exists.

From records to sculpture

One thin strip of color for every day. One layer for every year, stacked toward you, the oldest years fading into haze. The colors are anchored to absolute temperatures — glacial blue at 5 °F through pale haze to heat-red at 104 °F — never re-scaled per city, so a Reykjavík life reads frosty and a Phoenix life burns.

• Snow pulls a day toward white and pads the ridge — white shoulders on the hard winters.
• Heavy rain reads as relief and shadow: those days darken slightly and push small peaks into the ridgeline.
• Missing days — when a station simply didn’t report — are dimmed, like a faded memory. We never invent weather to fill a gap.

On your device

This site is static — there is no application server. Your browser downloads your city’s weather file, slices out the days since your birth, and sculpts them locally with WebGL. The share images and clips are drawn the same way, on a canvas in your browser. Your birthday is used only in that computation and in your browser’s own cache; it never leaves.

Shared skies are approximate on purpose

A share link carries a city and, at most, a birth year — so a sky opened from a link is regenerated from the year’s beginning, not from anyone’s birthday. The exact sculpture only ever exists on its owner’s device.

Limits, plainly

• Records cover the United States for now; more of the world is the plan.
• The earliest supported birthdate is January 2, 1940 — before that, daily records get too thin to be honest about.
• A station is a point on the map. The sky it recorded is the truest one we have for your town, but it is not your backyard.