Farfugla: Search For Cities Based On Climate
For many people, deciding where to live for part of the year starts with climate. Some want mild winters, others seek sunny summers without extreme heat, and most would prefer to avoid weeks of rain or oppressive humidity. Finding such places is harder than it sounds. Current tools require searching city by city, with no way to explore global options in one view.
Farfugla solves this by combining global weather reanalysis data with an interactive map-based search. Users can define the months of interest and filter cities by detailed climate parameters. These include apparent daytime temperature ranges, number of sunny, rainy, or snowy days, and population thresholds. Additional filters remove places with poor air quality or low safety, and the results appear instantly on an interactive world map.
The dataset behind Farfugla covers more than 47,000 cities. Historical weather records come from locally hosted Open-Meteo models based on satellite, station, and other observational inputs, with climate metrics calculated from multi-year averages. This approach ensures every location is covered, including areas without nearby weather stations. To keep the tool responsive, the database has been optimised for sub-20 millisecond queries, and frequently used results are cached on the server.
Farfugla runs on a Nuxt-based stack with a SQLite backend hosted on Cloudflare’s D1, supported by KV storage for cache management. The frontend is mobile-friendly, with clustering for dense city areas, tooltips for quick city information, and persistent filter settings using Pinia state management.
The application is already being used by people planning seasonal moves, long-term stays, or exploratory travel. Early testers have requested new features such as UV radiation filters, quality of life indices, and more granular population brackets. The roadmap includes these additions, along with detailed climate charts for each city.
The name comes from Icelandic, meaning “migratory birds”. Like its namesake, Farfugla helps users find the right conditions to move with the seasons, whether for work, leisure, or lifestyle change.
