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About It's Raining Somewhere

What it does

You pick a place on Earth. You hear the rain falling there now. If there's no rain, you hear other plausible sounds.

The sound is simulated. It's made from real weather data: how hard it is raining, the wind, the temperature, and whether there is thunder. It also estimates what the ground is like there, and how the scene would sound. It judges either from an openly licensed photo of that location, or from the satellite image.

It works best with headphones, and you should hear some binaural (3D) effects.

Where the rain data comes from

The rain on the map comes from our own radar service, Cloudburst. It collects public radar and satellite data, puts it on one map, and updates it every few minutes. These are the sources:

Where radar covers a place, the rain is measured, and it is good: in the United States, Canada, Europe and Taiwan. Everywhere else it is an estimate from satellites. These satellites cannot see rain, only the tops of clouds: tall, cold cloud tops mean heavy rain. The estimates are good at downpours and big storms. They are coarser than radar, they can miss drizzle from low clouds, and they can put a shower in the wrong spot. They arrive 15 to 20 minutes late; CMORPH-2 arrives about an hour late. The app tells you which source it is using, and says when it is an estimate.

Open radar data is not available for most other countries, including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa and India.

Wind, temperature, humidity and the type of weather (snow, sleet, thunder) come from a weather model: NOAA GFS, the US Global Forecast System. It is public domain. Our server downloads it four times a day and works out the weather at each point for the present minute. The model also supplies the rain where no radar or satellite source reaches. A model is a forecast, not a measurement, and it sees the world in squares about 25 km across, so a single shower can be in the wrong place.

The wind near you, and the wind drawn on the map, are finer: NOAA HRRR (3 km, public domain) over the United States, DWD ICON-EU (about 7 km; Source: Deutscher Wetterdienst, CC BY 4.0) over Europe, and GFS elsewhere, corrected by nearby airport weather reports (METAR) and the shape of the land.

Whether it is day or night is worked out from where the sun is. The local time comes from time zone maps by timezone-boundary-builder (ODbL).

Place names come from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) and Natural Earth. What the ground is like (water, pavement, grass, trees, sand, snow) comes from ESA WorldCover 2021 (CC BY 4.0).

The data providers do not endorse this app.

How the sound is made

The sound comes from a sound engine written in C++. On this website it runs in your browser, compiled to WebAssembly. It plays no recordings of rain, wind, thunder, sea or insects. It makes each drop from its size and speed and what it hits: water, pavement, grass, leaves. A roof, a car or an umbrella is treated as one object that every drop strikes, so it rings the way that object rings. Wind is made from the air moving past things near you, such as leaves, wires and buildings. Its strength at ear height is worked out from the reported wind and how rough the land is. Thunder is built from a new lightning channel for each flash. Each part of the channel sends out a pulse, and its distance from you sets when you hear it. We tuned the surfaces by measuring real rain recordings and comparing them with ours. No recordings are included.

The birds

The birds are the one part that is recorded. They are real recordings from xeno-canto, chosen from the species known near the spot (from GBIF observations). Each bird shows its recordist, its xeno-canto number and its licence while it sings. The bird photos are from iNaturalist, with their own credits and licences.

The photos in the View

The View shows a photo taken near the spot, when one can be found. The photos come from Wikimedia Commons and Panoramax. They are openly licensed. Each photo shows its author and licence, and links to its source page. When it is raining, a blue sky in the photo is painted grey so that it looks overcast. The rain is drawn on top. Where no photo is found, the View uses satellite imagery instead.

To guess where you would stand, our server shows the photo (not anything about you) to an AI vision model, which describes the scene: city, forest, shore and so on.

The map

The map uses tiles from OpenFreeMap, © OpenMapTiles, with data from © OpenStreetMap contributors. The satellite imagery is Sentinel-2 cloudless 2016 by EOX (CC BY 4.0). The terrain shading is from Mapzen and AWS Open Data.

Privacy

There is no account. There are no ads. There is no analytics or tracking script, and the page sets no cookies.

Your browser keeps your settings in its local storage, on your device only: where you stand and your environment choices, the mixer, the View, the wind drawing, which tips you have seen, and a 15-minute copy of a coarse world rain map. It also keeps two lists there, which never leave your device: the places you stayed at for more than five seconds, and the birds you heard. Each has a "Clear the list" button in the settings, and clearing your site data removes everything.

To work, the app sends some things to other servers:

Our server counts map loads per half hour, to keep within its limits. For this it keeps a short hash of your IP address and browser name, and deletes it within a few hours. Our server also keeps an ordinary access log for fixing problems. Each line holds the time, the address asked for (which includes the map point), and the IP address it came from. The log is deleted as it fills up, after a few weeks at most. We don't sell or share it. The site is hosted on Cloudflare.

Who made it

It's Raining Somewhere is made by Suncost Labs (Suncost LLC).

Questions, corrections or problems: [email protected].