How hot is the hottest city on Earth, and how cold is the coldest? Where does it rain the most, where almost never, and where has the climate changed fastest since 1981?
Climates of the World answers these questions with numbers, not adjectives. It covers more than five thousand named cities, 238 countries and territories, thousands of states and provinces, and 14,550 weather stations, all from one consistent open dataset built on NASA POWER (MERRA-2 and CERES) and NOAA GHCN-Daily station observations.
Inside you will find:
- A census of climate types: which Köppen climates the world's cities live in, continent by continent.
- Ranked tables of the hottest, coldest, wettest, driest, sunniest, cloudiest, most humid, windiest and snowiest cities, based on 1991–2020 climate normals.
- Seasons in numbers: annual temperature range, how many months are hot, dry, frosty or snow-covered, and why the warmest month in much of South Asia comes before the monsoon rather than in July.
- Country comparisons, including how different a country's climate looks when weighted by where people live instead of by land area.
- Forty-five years of warming, 1981–2025: land temperature by five-year period, continents by decade, the fastest- and slowest-warming countries, regions and cities, with confidence intervals.
- Records: the highest and lowest temperatures in the gridded data and at weather stations, from Death Valley to the East Antarctic Plateau and Siberia.
- Thirty month-by-month climate profiles of well-known cities, from Tokyo and Delhi to London, Lagos, Lima and Sydney.
- An honest chapter testing the gridded numbers against thousands of thermometers, showing where they are reliable and where they are not.
- Reference appendices for every country and territory and for two hundred large cities.
Every table and chart is computed directly from the open data files; nothing is estimated by hand. Sources and licences are listed in full.
Ideal for geography lovers, travellers planning by season, teachers and students, writers, and anyone curious about how the world's climates compare.
Made with AI assistance (procedural data + AI-written text): every table was computed by code from the open datasets listed in the book, and the explanatory text was drafted with an AI model and checked against those tables.
Custom data books, tables or charts on commission: hello@lilambd.com
