How SeasonScore works
Every city gets a score from 0 to 10 for each month, so you can see at a glance when a place is at its best. A city and month always show the same score everywhere on the site.
What goes into the score
Four factors, combined in different proportions:
- ☀️ Weather comfort: temperature, humidity and rain in a typical year
- 🍃 Air quality: typical air pollution for the month
- 🌊 Seasonal hazards: things like flood, storm, smoke-haze or extreme-heat seasons
- 🛡️ Safety: everyday travel safety for the country. We never show a country as safer than official government travel advice.
If we don't have data for a factor, we leave it out and say so on the page. We never fill gaps with invented numbers.
Labels
8.5+ Excellent · 7.5+ Very good · 6.5+ Good · below 6.5 Fair. “Fair” is the lowest label. A lower score means trade-offs (heat, rain, haze), not that you shouldn’t go.
Historical vs live
Monthly scores are historical. They describe a typical month, not this year’s weather. Live information appears separately in the “Right now” panel, with a source and an updated time for each part, and is never part of the score. If a live feed fails, the panel says so rather than showing placeholder content.
Data sources & credits
- Climate: NASA POWER (MERRA-2 reanalysis) (2015–2024), with weather-station normals from national weather services for most cities
- Air quality: CAMS global model via Open-Meteo
- Seasons: national weather services where they define named seasons (Thai Meteorological Department, Meteorological Service Singapore, Japan Meteorological Agency, India Meteorological Department); elsewhere classified from the climate data
- Safety: US State Department and UK Foreign Office (FCDO) travel advice
- Live data: Open-Meteo (weather, forecast and air quality), GDACS (UN / European Commission) and USGS (disasters and earthquakes), GOV.UK (travel advice)
- Headlines: Google News, last 7 days, unverified third-party content
- Holidays: the open-source holidays calendar, plus the Japan National Tourism Organization for Obon and the year-end break
- Nature calendar: Japan Meteorological Agency, Japan Weather Association (tenki.jp), Korea Meteorological Administration, Weather i (Korea) and the US National Park Service
- Photos: Wikimedia Commons, freely licensed images only; each photo shows its author and licence and links to its source page
- Country flags: Twemoji graphics (CC BY 4.0) via the country-flag-emoji-polyfill font (MIT)
Good to know
- Climate and air-quality data are partly modelled, so a specific valley, coast or neighbourhood can differ from the city average. Always check the live reading before you go.
- Holidays shown are national ones; regional holidays and school breaks are not included.
- Safety and hazard information is reviewed city by city and updated over time. Spotted something wrong? Tell us.