Methodology

Rank My Weather compares places by how often the weather matches your preferences. Scores use hourly ERA5 weather data. The data period runs from January 1, 2021 through December 31, 2025.

How the score works

We check 12 hours each day, from 8 am to 8 pm. An hour counts only when it meets all your selected limits for feels-like temperature, cloud cover, precipitation and wind gusts. Choosing "Any" removes that limit.

Every 12 matching hours add up to one equivalent good-weather day. Six matching hours on a day count as half a day. We add those hours across the five years and divide by 12, then by five, to get good-weather days per year. A score of 200 therefore does not mean 200 days with good weather from morning to evening.

When you select a month or season, we count only hours in that period and average across the five years. The percentage shows the share of hours checked that match your preferences.

Feels-like temperature estimates comfort in the shade from air temperature, humidity and wind. It excludes the warming effect of direct sunlight. Precipitation limits apply to the amount in each hour. The 8 am to 8 pm window uses an approximate local solar time based on longitude, which can differ from the local clock. It does not change for daylight saving time.

Which places appear

A city entry can cover a continuous urban area that includes several municipalities. We use boundaries from the European Commission's Global Human Settlement Layer and the population of the whole urban area. Its score averages the weather across that area, with each grid cell weighted by how much of the area it covers. Other towns and cities use GeoNames records and weather from the nearest available land grid cell.

To reduce duplicate entries, we keep larger places first and omit nearby places whose centres are within 10 km of an already included place in the same country. Rankings include places with at least 50,000 people; the city directory and individual city pages require at least 100,000.

What the data can tell you

Five years of weather gives a recent comparison between places. It is too short to establish a long-term climate average and cannot predict the weather for a particular trip.

The data uses a 0.25° grid, about 28 km from north to south. It cannot resolve differences between neighbourhoods, including local fog or coastal breezes. Hourly readings also miss changes within an hour. Coverage is limited to land grid cells centred between 60°S and 72°N.

Monthly weather averages on city pages use daily summaries. They describe the weather through the full day, while match percentages use the hours from 8 am to 8 pm.

Data sources

Weather data: NSF NCAR Curated ERA5 on AWS Open Data (DOI 10.5065/BH6N-5N20 ) . Urban boundaries, names and populations: European Commission GHS-WUP-MTUC R2025A. Other places: GeoNames. Both place datasets are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Basemap: OpenFreeMap / OpenMapTiles / OpenStreetMap contributors.

Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information (2026). Neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use of this information.