About Pweener

Pweener collects daily weather observations from monitoring points inside deserts around the world and puts them in one place, so a single desert can be read on its own terms or held up against another.

Where the data comes from

Every row comes from Open-Meteo.com, pulled server-side on a schedule — never from your browser. Open-Meteo in turn aggregates output from national meteorological agencies including the DWD, NOAA, ECMWF, Météo-France and the JMA. Each daily record is tagged with its source:

forecast — written by the daily job from the forecast endpoint, so the most recent days are available immediately.
archive — the revised, reanalysed value that replaces the forecast row once the archive catches up, roughly two weeks later.

That means the last fortnight of any chart is provisional and will be quietly corrected. The Source column in each station’s table view tells you which you are looking at.

Licence and attribution

Open-Meteo publishes its data under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0), which permits reuse on condition that the source is credited, the licence is linked, and any modifications are declared. The credit sits in the footer of every page on this site.

Changes made. The figures here are not raw API responses. They have been: stored to one row per station per local calendar day; converted for display from the stored SI units when the imperial toggle is on; rolled up across a desert’s stations on the overview, comparison and record views (maxima by MAX, minima by MIN, everything else by mean); and, for the most recent fortnight, revised in place as forecast rows are replaced by archive ones. Nothing here should be attributed to Open-Meteo as a verbatim reading.

Open-Meteo’s free tier is for non-commercial use, capped below 10,000 API calls per day. This site carries no advertising and no subscription, and its scheduled job makes a handful of calls a day, so it sits inside those terms.

What a “station” is

Deserts do not come with weather stations at their hearts. Each point here is a fixed latitude and longitude chosen to sit inside the desert proper rather than at the nearest airport on its margin, and the values are gridded model output for that coordinate, not a physical thermometer reading. Every monitoring point carries a note explaining why it was picked; you will find them at the bottom of each desert’s page.

Units

Everything is stored in SI — degrees Celsius, millimetres, kilometres per hour, megajoules per square metre — and converted for display. The °C / °F button in the header switches the whole site between metric and imperial, and remembers the choice in your browser.

Reading the charts

Every chart has a Table view button. Nothing is reachable only by hovering, and the tables print.
Charts respond to keyboard: focus one and use the arrow keys to step through days, Home and End to jump to the ends.
Colours are assigned per subject and never re-assigned by rank, so filtering a desert out never repaints the ones that remain.

How it is built

Static HTML on Cloudflare Pages, a handful of Pages Functions reading a Cloudflare D1 database, and about a thousand lines of plain JavaScript. There is no framework and no charting library — the SVG is drawn by hand, which is why the site loads no third-party script beyond what Cloudflare itself injects. What that injection collects is set out in the privacy policy.

Caveats

Model output, not instrument records. Treat single-day extremes as indicative.
“Records” on this site means the standout days in the data we hold — not verified meteorological records.
Desert-level figures roll up their stations, so a desert with one monitoring point is not directly comparable to one with six.