Live weather in clay miniature: each city lit by its real sun and moon and dressed in its weather right now.
The page opens on a globe with the day and night where they really are and each city marked with an icon of its current weather and its temperature. Fine trails drift across it with the wind of the latest global forecast. Pick a city and the camera dives in to its floating island.
Each island follows its city:
- The sun and moon sit where they are in that sky, so the light, shadows, window lights and sky colours follow the local time.
- Clouds, rain, snow, fog, wind and lightning come from the current conditions.
- Smaller things come and go too. Chimneys smoke when it is cold. Gulls circle on clear days, and fireflies come out on warm nights. A rainbow can appear when light rain meets a low sun.
- Each city has touches of its own, listed below.
From west to east, as the arrows step through them. Times are local.
| City | Touches |
|---|---|
| Honolulu | Surfers ride the waves off Waikiki; torches are lit along the beach at dusk. |
| San Francisco | Fog pours in through the Golden Gate below the tower tops; a foghorn calls through it (with sound). |
| Mexico City | The flag over the Zócalo flies from 8:00 to 18:00; marigolds and candles ring the square for the Day of the Dead, 31 October to 2 November; jacarandas flower in March. |
| Chicago | The river turns green on the Saturday before St Patrick's Day. |
| New York | The Empire State Building's crown changes colour at night. |
| Buenos Aires | The Floralis Genérica opens its steel petals at 8:00 and closes them at midnight, or whenever the wind is strong; on 25 May and 9 July it stays open through the night. After dark it glows red inside. |
| Rio de Janeiro | A cable car shuttles between Urca and Sugarloaf. |
| Reykjavik | Northern lights on clear, dark nights; the Imagine Peace Tower shines on its dates; snow lies on Esja from November to April. |
| London | Big Ben strikes the hour (with sound). |
| Paris | The Eiffel Tower sparkles for five minutes on the hour after dark. |
| Venice | St Mark's Square floods in autumn and winter storms. |
| Berlin | The sun draws a cross on the TV tower's ball; kites fly over Tempelhof on windy days. |
| Cape Town | Cloud pours over Table Mountain when the south-easter blows; the noon gun fires at 12:00 except on Sundays, with a boom if sound is on. |
| Istanbul | The bridge's cables change colour at night. |
| Cairo | Feluccas sail south while the north wind blows and drift north on the current when it drops; the Cairo Tower's lattice changes colour at night. |
| Nairobi | Wind turbines on the Ngong Hills turn to face the wind and spin with it; they stand still in calm air and in a gale. Giraffes and zebras graze in the national park below the skyline. |
| Giresun | Boats go round Giresun Island on 20 May for the Aksu festival; hazelnuts dry below the groves in August. |
| Dubai | The fountain dances at showtime; sand haze drifts in on windy, dry days. |
| Mumbai | The Queen's Necklace glows along Marine Drive at night; monsoon waves break over the sea wall on windy days. |
| Agra | Never floodlit, the Taj Mahal stands dark at night; on the nights around the full moon its marble shines in the moonlight. |
| Bangkok | Candlelit floats drift down the river on the November full moon. |
| Singapore | The Supertrees light up in colour for Garden Rhapsody at 19:45 and 20:45; the Merlion spouts into the bay. |
| Hong Kong | Lasers sweep from the rooftops from 20:00 to 20:10. |
| Seoul | The tower on Namsan glows blue, green, yellow or red at night with the city's fine dust, as the real one does; Banpo Bridge's rainbow fountain plays at 12:00 and every half hour from 19:30 to 21:00 (to 21:30 from June to September), 15 March to 31 October, unless it rains or the wind reaches 7 m/s. |
| Tokyo | Tokyo Tower and Sensō-ji stand by the Sumida among cherry trees. |
| Sydney | Fireworks at 21:00 and midnight on New Year's Eve; jacarandas flower purple from mid-October through November. |
| Auckland | Yachts come out on breezy days; the pohutukawa along the shore flower red in December. |
pnpm install
pnpm dev # http://localhost:5181
pnpm build # type-checks, then builds to dist/Every island has its own address, e.g. /#paris or /#new-york. For development, a few query parameters override the live data:
| Parameter | Effect |
|---|---|
?w=clear |
Force the weather: clear, overcast, rain, storm, snow, fog or rainbow |
?shift=6 |
Move the clock by some hours |
?temp=3 |
Force the temperature the island reacts to |
- three.js renders the scene. Every island is built in code from rounded boxes, cones and lathes. Its parts are merged by material, so each island is drawn in a handful of draw calls.
- SunCalc gives the positions of the sun and moon.
- Open-Meteo provides the current weather (CC BY 4.0).
- Seoul's fine dust comes from Open-Meteo's air-quality forecast, which uses the global forecast of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). Contains modified Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service information 2026; neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use made of the information it contains.
- The globe's coastlines come from Natural Earth via world-atlas. They are drawn with d3-geo.
- The globe's wind is the 10 m wind of NOAA's Global Forecast System (GFS), from NOMADS; NOAA's data is in the public domain. A GitHub Actions job packs the latest forecast into a small file every six hours.
- The ambient sound is synthesised in the browser with the Web Audio API.
- The hand-drawn icons are from Koboyo.
MIT © Aras Mehmet. The icons in src/icons are not covered by the MIT licence; they fall under Koboyo's licence.