the files behind every page, served as static assets — no API, no key, no rate limit beyond the CDN's
Sun Season runs entirely on four static files. Two grayscale PNG sprites hold monthly rainfall and mean temperature for every 0.25° cell on Earth; a small JSON file describes the grid and its encoding; a TSV lists 34,005 cities with coordinates. Anyone can fetch them, decode them in a few lines, and get the same numbers this site shows.
| File | What it holds |
|---|---|
/climate/meta.json | Grid width and height (1440 × 720), degrees per cell (0.25), mm-per-value scale (8), temperature encoding, no-data marker (255), source attribution. |
/climate/prec_all.png | Rainfall: 12 frames of 1440 × 720 stacked vertically, January on top. Pixel value v = v × 8 mm per month (254 = 2,032 mm or more; 255 = sea / no data). Row 0 is 90° N, column 0 is 180° W. |
/climate/temp_all.png | Mean temperature, same layout: v × 0.5 − 50 °C (255 = no data). |
/geo/places.tsv | 34,005 cities: name ⇥ ISO country ⇥ lat ⇥ lon, sorted by population descending. |
For latitude φ and longitude λ: row = floor((90 − φ) / 0.25), col = floor((λ + 180) / 0.25), and month m (0–11) sits at pixel (col, m × 720 + row). Read the red channel. The rules that turn those numbers into rain classes and verdicts are on the method page and in the site's open source.
The grids are derived from WorldClim 2.1 (Fick, S.E. and Hijmans, R.J., 2017: WorldClim 2: new 1-km spatial resolution climate surfaces for global land areas, International Journal of Climatology 37) and carry its CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Places are from GeoNames cities15000 under CC BY 4.0. If you use the files, credit WorldClim and link back to Sun Season.
