About a year ago I started a project to put current weather conditions in a climate context (hoyextremo.com). Anyone could check if we are going through extreme conditions by comparing with past climate. It started with a few stations, mostly selected due to personal preferences. I received requests from people who wanted their cities to be included. Thus the set rapidly grew and now almost all provinces are represented.

Two factors limited whether a station could be included: It must be automatically updated through AEMET OpenData system and it must have a long enough record to set the frame of typical climate conditions.

I felt that many locations were excluded from this set, although there is very valuable data available through AEMET OpenData for them. So I decided to set up a website where you could go and check recent weather conditions (last 24 hours) for a set of variables: maximum and minimum temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, wind and insolation. Of course, for most of them, there is no way to compare against a climate record, but they provide a very illustrating picture of what is happening in Spain in terms of weather. For example, it is very interesting to see how precipitating systems propagate, since the density of stations is very high. It is also possible to confirm the highly local nature of rainfall because stations that are only a few kilometres away often record very different amounts of rainfall.

It was a bit challenging, because I am no expert in web design and I had in mind a very clear layout for showing the data and a clear feel of the map itself. Also I wanted to include some sort of interactivity. I used very basic knowledge of javascript and Mapbox to create the map and add the possibility for the user to interact with it.

Now anyone can do most of the actions we are used to with maps (zoom, move around, etc), and also one can click on each station to get a summary of recent variable values. In the near future, I plan to add plots that display the evolution of these variables over the last few days. In the mean time, I hope you like it and find it useful.