Almost every weather website and app can tell you what the weekend forecast looks like, letting you know if you should dress for rain, sunshine, cold or snow. However, what if you could check the weather 50 years from now and see how climate change might impact your local area?
Now, there is a new website, WXshift.com by Climate Central, that allows you to do that: you can check the weather in the far future and see how climate change affects the forecast in your city or neighborhood.
Let's face it, even among those who believe that climate change is real, it doesn't seem that much of a threat. However, if we could look into a crystal ball and see how it affects weather in the future, we might not only think more about it, but it could prompt us to take small steps in our daily lives to prevent further climate change.
That's the goal of WXshift, which seeks to inform without getting political and without the usual doom and gloom message that many people have already heard on the topic. Considering that the weather is one of the hottest search subjects online, it makes sense to incorporate such a forecast tool into a weather website.
The site works like this: every day, it collects data about weather trends. So, for example, if it's storming in your area, that data can tell you how many more storms your area has seen in the past decade. All this data shows how climate change, particularly global warming, affects weather, even when it seems that winters are colder than ever.
"You can tailor it," said Climate Central senior vice president Richard Wiles to FastCo.Exist. "In Minnesota, you do the number of days below -10. And you can see it's just dropping. In St. Louis, how many days below zero? In the past 10 years, they haven't had a night below zero, and they used to have them all the time."
The website also features articles about climate change, along with statistics that show the effects of global warming. Next year, the company hopes to release an app for mobile users.
"If humanity has one binding thread, it is quite possibly the weather," wrote Climate Central's Geoff Grant on the site's blog. "But weather is also how we are connected to the climate and the ways in which it's changing. It is how the greater forces of the atmosphere come home to roost in our daily lives."
Via: FastCo.Exist
