About

Andrew Bond

Travel-climate data researcher

Best Time To Visit is a small research project: city-by-city travel-climate scoring built on published meteorology and the Holiday Climate Index framework (Scott, Rutty & Amelung 2016), the same family Copernicus C3S runs operationally. Source data is ERA5 reanalysis via Open-Meteo (free, no key, public); sea temperatures from NOAA OISST and Open-Meteo's marine archive; crowd seasonality from Google Trends search-interest.

Editorial bias: we score honestly even when the answer is unflattering. When a destination is uncomfortable at certain times of year, the score reflects that — heat caps, cold caps, and humidity penalties are spelt out in the methodology section on each city page rather than hidden behind a "8/10 looks great year-round" headline.

How scoring works (short version)

Holiday Climate Index — Scott, Rutty & Amelung 2016. Four sub-indices (thermal comfort, sky clarity, precipitation, wind) weighted into 0–100, displayed as 1–10.
Outdoor apparent temperature — Steadman / BoM form. Folds humidity (vapour pressure) and wind into a single feels-like value.
Override gate — CCI-derived (Ma, Craig & Feng 2020). Caps the composite when extreme heat or extreme cold makes a month genuinely unvisitable, so clear skies and dry weather can't prop up a deal-breaker month.
Humidity factor — MHCI2-style inverted-U. Penalises both muggy and bone-dry conditions away from the ~50% RH sweet spot.
Window — primary display is the 2020-2024 recent ERA5 window; 1991-2020 normal available as a toggle for the long-term reference.

Full methodology and citations live on each city page below the chart.

Contact

The site is open-built — code and data fetching scripts are visible on each city's methodology section. For corrections or questions, find the author via the channels above.