Lodestar
Sign in

Use cases

Finding a place by climate

People describe climate in adjectives: "mild", "dry", "sunny", "not too cold". The map only knows numbers. This scenario is the translation layer between the two.

The situation

You know what you want from the weather. You do not have a list of places that match it. Friends keep recycling the same five towns from their Instagram feed. You want every option on one screen — and you want to keep or drop them on numbers, not on someone else's holiday.

The path

  1. 01Translate the adjective into a range

    A "mild winter" is roughly a January between five and ten degrees. "Dry summer" is humidity under fifty percent. "Sunny" is more than two hundred sun-days a year. Start with wide ranges and tighten on the second pass.

  2. 02Open the filters panel and set the ranges

    Pull the slider thumbs to the ranges you decided on. The map dims locations that fail; the choropleth still shades the ones that pass.

  3. 03Switch the choropleth to a climate layer

    Annual mean and January temperature are the two most useful layers here. Shading reveals the warm and cold ends of your filtered set at a glance.

  4. 04Save the cluster that interests you

    Hit Save on the locations that look promising. You usually end up with two or three regions — not individual towns.

  5. 05Tighten the filters

    Once the broad set has a shape, push the sliders harder. A second pass with stricter ranges typically cuts the shortlist in half.

What you walk away with

  • A shortlist organized by climate, not by what other people suggested.
  • A URL that encodes your filters — useful to share or to come back to.
  • A clear answer to "what does the climate of place X actually look like compared to Y".

When this does not fit

If a specific town is already on your mind, the filters panel is the long way around. Open the details panel for that town and read the climate block straight off. Same data, fewer clicks.

Frequently asked

Which climate layer is most useful?

January temperature, almost always. It is the month people regret most after moving somewhere colder than they expected. Annual mean is too averaged-out to act on.

What about microclimates?

The data is aggregated per location. Two villages five kilometres apart but separated by a ridge can have very different microclimates that the data does not capture. Use the map for the macro picture; visit for the micro.

How current is the climate data?

The underlying records typically reflect the past thirty years, refreshed annually. The verified date on the details panel for any location tells you when the last refresh ran.

Verified · 2026-05-26