About It's Raining Somewhere

What it does

You pick a place on Earth. You hear the rain falling there now.

The sound is simulated. It is not a recording. It is made from the weather at that place: how hard it is raining, the wind, the temperature, and whether there is thunder. It also uses what the ground is like there, and where you choose to stand: in the open, under an umbrella, in a car, indoors and so on.

It works best with headphones.

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:

• NOAA/NSSL MRMS: radar for the United States, Alaska, Hawaii, the Caribbean and Guam. Public domain.
• EUMETNET OPERA: radar for Europe. Contains EUMETNET OPERA data (CC BY 4.0). We change it: we convert radar reflectivity to rain rate and remove noise.
• Environment and Climate Change Canada: radar for Canada. Data Source: Environment and Climate Change Canada.
• Central Weather Administration (CWA), Taiwan: radar for Taiwan. Open Government Data License, Taiwan 1.0.
• NOAA GOES-R ABI RRQPE: satellite rain estimates for the Americas, the Atlantic and the eastern Pacific. Public domain.
• NOAA CPC CMORPH-2: satellite rain estimates for the whole globe. Public domain.

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. Satellite estimates are coarser. They can miss light rain and put showers in the wrong spot. CMORPH-2 also 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, day or night, and the type of weather (snow, thunder) come from Open-Meteo. Weather data by Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0). Open-Meteo also supplies the rain where no radar or satellite source reaches.

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. 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 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.

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 a few settings in its local storage, on your device only: where you stand, whether soft drops are on, whether "Find rain" sticks to land, the View's state and slideshow setting, and a 15-minute copy of a coarse world rain map. Clearing your site data removes them.

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

• The point at the centre of the map goes to our server, for the rain, the place name, the ground type and nearby photos. What you type in the search box goes there too.
• The centre of the map, and a few points around it, go to Open-Meteo for the weather.
• The photos load straight from Wikimedia Commons or Panoramax.

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: contact@suncostlabs.com.