What was the weather the day you were born?

Pick your birthday and the city you were born in above. You’ll see that day’s high and low, rain or snow, wind, and when the sun rose and set there. It works for any city in the world, for any day from 1940 to today.

From 1981 on, from NASA’s POWER project, which publishes daily weather for every point on Earth from the MERRA-2 and GEOS models. From 1940 to 1980, from the nearest NOAA weather station with a daily record (GHCN-Daily) when there’s one close by, otherwise from NOAA’s 20th Century Reanalysis or Copernicus ERA5, the climate scientists’ reconstruction of the atmosphere.

A station reading is what a thermometer near your city actually recorded. The model and reanalysis values cover a grid square tens of miles across, so they describe the region’s day rather than one street corner: usually within a few degrees of a local thermometer, and good at telling a hot day from a cold one or a wet day from a dry one.

Daily, worldwide weather records start around then. Earlier days have records only for some cities, so we don’t guess.

NASA’s daily data has temperature, rain and wind but no sky condition, so for those days we show the temperatures and rain instead of inventing a “sunny” or “cloudy”.

Yes, the same archive and the same numbers. Your full story adds the sky above your city that night, the #1 song, what things cost and the news of the day.