Planning a road trip around the weather
Geef Zon! is Dutch for “give sun”. I built this map to plan a road trip across Europe: which way should you drive for good weather? Eleven independent weather models and two ensembles are summarised per region into a single score from 0 to 100, how pleasant it is there that day to drive around and be outside, based on temperature, rain, sunshine and wind. Green is ideal, blue too cold or too wet, red too hot. What counts as pleasant differs per person, so you can adjust the weighting yourself. Click a region for the individual models behind its score.
Your preferences
What counts as good weather differs per person. The map recalculates instantly.
Ideal temperature
Everything inside this band gets full marks. Penalties only start outside it.
Reset to default
Appearance
Automatic
Light
Dark
Colour-blind friendly scale
Trades the gradual colour ramp for wider spacing between steps. Switches on by itself if your system asks for more contrast.
On the map
Leaving out both draws the rest about 40% larger. Which one helps most depends on the shape of your window: Scandinavia costs height, Turkey and Cyprus width.
Scandinavia
Turkey and Cyprus
About this map
This interactive weather map of Europe shows the median of eleven weather models, with the uncertainty from the ECMWF and GEFS ensembles.
Each region is read at its largest city. The further ahead, the fewer models still reach: the hatching shows where they disagree.
Sources
Weather data from
Open-Meteo ,
CC BY 4.0
Region boundaries: Eurostat GISCO, NUTS 2024,
© EuroGeographics for the administrative boundaries
Microstates and place names:
Natural Earth ,
public domain
Updated 9 Oct 07:23
Models used
Model
Institute
Days
ECMWF IFS
European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
15
ECMWF AIFS
European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
15
NOAA GFS
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, US
16
DWD ICON
Deutscher Wetterdienst
7
CMC GEM
Canadian Meteorological Centre
10
Météo-France ARPEGE
Météo-France
4
UK Met Office
Met Office, UK
7
KNMI Harmonie
Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute
3
DMI Harmonie
Danmarks Meteorologiske Institut
3
MET Norway
Meteorologisk institutt, Norway
3
ARPAE ICON-2I
ARPAE Emilia-Romagna, Italy
3
Past seven days out, only the global models still contribute. The hatching shows where they contradict each other: the coarser the hatching, the less the forecast is worth.