Outside My Window

Visualization app for French daily climatological data from Météo-France (data.gouv.fr).

Select a department, a weather station, and a year range to explore temperature, precipitation, and wind history, or compare the temperature distribution of two periods.

Requirements

• Python 3.13+
• uv

Build the station index

The map requires a pre-built index of all stations. Run this once (and again if the station network changes):

uv run python scripts/build_station_index.py

This fetches the latest-period file for each department sequentially and writes data/stations.json.

Build the resource index

Downloads use stable data.gouv.fr permalinks resolved from data/resources.json. Rebuild it only if the dataset re-issues resources with new ids:

uv run python scripts/build_resource_index.py

Run the app

uv run python app.py

Then open http://127.0.0.1:8050 in your browser.

The landing page is a map of all stations. Click a station to view its temperature, precipitation, and wind history. Department data is fetched from Météo-France on first visit and cached locally under data/cache/.

Run as a desktop app (Electron)

Additional requirements: Node.js (includes npm)

npm install        # install Electron (one-time)
npm start          # launch the desktop window

This starts a local waitress server on a random port (8050–8149) and opens it in an Electron window. The Python sidecar is killed automatically when you close the window.

Data is cached for 6 hours; press Ctrl+Shift+R (Cmd+Shift+R on macOS) to force-refresh the latest data immediately instead of waiting for the cache to expire.

The uv run python app.py workflow above still works for browser-based development.

Run the tests

uv run pytest tests/ --cov=src --cov-report=term-missing

Features

Station map

Browse all Météo-France stations across metropolitan France and overseas departments. Click any marker to navigate directly to that station's history.

Daily observations

Explore daily temperature (min/max band), precipitation, and wind for any station and year range. Switch between daily, weekly, and monthly granularity.

Yearly extremes

Track hot days (Tmin ≥ 20 °C and Tmax ≥ 35 °C) and cold days (Tmin < 0 °C) year by year. Optional trend lines show the long-term evolution with slope and R².

Monthly averages

Compare average Tmin and Tmax by month of year, either over the full record or broken down by decade to visualise long-term shifts.

Comparison

Overlay the smoothed probability density of daily Tmax and Tmin for two year ranges over the same season window (e.g. 1 Jun – 31 Aug, 1961–1990 against 1995–2024), so the shift of the whole distribution — and of its hot tail — is directly readable. Curves are Gaussian kernel density estimates with a Silverman bandwidth. A stats line below gives the mean, median and p90 of each period plus the shift between them.