Historical wet bulb globe temperature, or historical AccuWeather RealFeel data, or historical UV index data? (climate, snow)

[aaarrm]

Hello,

I'm a programmer and was planning on doing a little hobby project to create my own 'comfort index' using more variable than temp/humidity, and then I wanted to look at historical data to try to find the most 'comfortable' places in the US to me. Hoping to stumble upon some cool microclimates too.

I realized that most people just look at temp/humidity but personally I think UV index is super important to how hot I am, and wind speed plays a significant factor as well, which is what made me want to come up with my own index. Here is what the process has looked like:

1. I'm not able to find historical UV index data. I'm honestly not sure if it exists anywhere out there. I suppose technically if I could find historical UV irradiation data, and historical cloud cover data, and historical ozone data, I could calculate UV index for each location but that seems less feasible tbh.


2. I learned about wet bulb globe temperature, which is basically what I'm aiming for (though I feel like they don't consider UV index enough!) Information on this is kind of terrible I find. It's hard to even find good current calculators for this, let alone historical data. I doubt I'd be able to find historical data for this, but I thought I'd bring it up just in case anyone has a source.


3. AccuWeather has a RealFeel that factors in these things, I figured if I could find historical data for this, I could just leverage that for my use-case. However I don't think they still offer a historical weather API for people. I saw that some third party data companies have it for sale (Snowflake had it on their data marketplace), but these places are often crazy expensive and are strictly for corporate-level data solutions, not something a hobbyist like me could get access to. I know AccuWeather probably offers their data to multiple providers, so I was wondering if anyone knew of one that had a free plan, or a cheap plan, maybe the API per hit or something.


Thanks everyone! I'm basically just in search of a super comfortable climate, and I like data, so this seemed like a fun and interesting way to tackle it. But running into these roadblocks makes me wonder if it's feasible to complete it.

[psyche_da_mike24]

Sounds like a cool project! Feel free to message me if you're looking for collaborators- I made a series of very simple climate classification programs using Java a few years back

[aaarrm]

Thanks, psyche_da_mike, but mainly my issue now is if I'll even be able to progress with the project at all due to the data being available or not. I'm not sure what other forums to ask in to see if anyone knows of where to grab this data from.