Yesterday’s Weather
The way weather reports work is all wrong. They always tell you the next three-to-five days. What I want is just two days, and one of those days should be yesterday! That’s right, I don’t want to know the future, I want to know the past, or, more precisely, how the present compares with the past. Will today be colder? wetter? windier? If I was cold yesterday (and I was) should I wear more or less layers today?
Weather is such an abstract concept. I have no idea what 55°F means on any given day. But I do know what it meant for me yesterday, so just tell me: Will it be the same, or different?
Some web sites do give you access to yesterday’s weather, but I’ve never seen anything that gives you a comparison of yesterday’s weather with today’s, or which even shows them side-by-side.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
// Begin Comments & Trackbacks ?>What I’d like is one of those nice 7-day forcast type layouts, but with yesterday included. Nobody does that…
Old school: The New York Times prints today’s, tomorrow’s, and yesterday’s weather in the top corner of the front page. Paper, that is. Remember paper?
Wow. Really? Childhood memories must have conditioned me to expect the weather in this format. Now why can’t the online version catch up?
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.








The NOAA site does give 2-day historical data. Get your 7-day forecast, then under the table in “current conditions” there’s a link for “2 day history,” which gives the weather on an hourly breakdown for the last 48 hours. Presumably they have some data feed that can use this and you could roll your own if you were the kind inclined towards rolling your own.