About ExtremeNow
ExtremeNow ranks the hottest, coldest and windiest places on Earth using the latest surface weather reports (METARs) published by the NOAA / National Weather Service Aviation Weather Center. Thousands of airports and weather stations worldwide send these reports, usually every 30–60 minutes.
How we clean the data
- Freshness: reports older than 2 hours (or time-stamped in the future) are ignored.
- Physical limits: temperatures outside −90…57 °C, dew point above temperature, or sustained wind above 120 kt are rejected.
- Decoding check: the temperature is re-read from the raw report text and must match.
- Maintenance flags: stations that flag themselves as needing maintenance are excluded from rankings.
- Neighbours: a temperature more than 12 °C away from nearby stations (adjusted for altitude) is treated as a sensor error; extreme wind with calm neighbours is rejected.
- Station history: every leaderboard candidate is checked against its own last 3 hours of reports; sudden spikes are removed. Stations without recent history are not ranked.
- Inhabited places only (default): by default we hide Antarctica, offshore platforms, rigs and ships, and any station more than 25 km from a town or city of at least 5,000 people (GeoNames). This keeps the boards about places people actually live. Switch to "All stations" in the header to see everything.
- Variety: global boards show at most 3 stations per country, so one storm or desert does not fill the whole list.
- Duplicates: stations within 3 km of each other count once.
Rankings are automated and can still contain errors. They are not official records. For official observations and warnings, consult your national weather service.
Source & independence
Observation data courtesy of NOAA / NWS Aviation Weather Center (aviationweather.gov), a U.S. Government work. ExtremeNow is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by NOAA, the NWS, or any government. Values shown have been filtered and converted by ExtremeNow.