Memory · Archive · iPhone
You remember the weather. The archive kept a record.
“There was always snow at Christmas.” “Summers were never this hot.” Neve Vesper asks about the weather of your own past, waits for your answer from memory, and only then opens the archive for your town, one year at a time. What you keep is the gap between the two.
Who it is for
Everyone carries a private weather: the white Christmases of childhood, the long dry summers of being sixteen, the sun on a wedding day. There has never been a simple way to check any of it. Weather archives are tables, and none of them knows your town or your years.
Neve Vesper builds its questions from your own life: the place you grew up and the years you were there. It keeps the record shut until you have answered. Then it shows both, side by side, and adds the same measure for the last seven years. It draws no conclusions. It shows two rows and two numbers and leaves the rest to you.
The app looks only backwards. It shows past weather and says nothing about tomorrow.
What is inside
How many of your seven childhood Christmases were white? How many hot days did the summer you turned ten really have? You answer from memory by marking years, turning a dial or picking one. The question cannot be opened until you do.
The years open one after another: your answer stays as an outline, the archive is laid over it. Years where the snow was too thin to call are hatched and count either way.
Each counted answer leans one way or the other. After three answers on an axis the lean becomes a figure: you remember winters 38% snowier than the archive, or summers a little cooler. Three axes: winter, summer, rain.
Under every result sits a second row: the same measure, same town, for the last seven years. There is no commentary, only the two rows next to each other.
Pick any date since 1940 and a town. The day plays back as a moving sky, 24 hours in 20 seconds, drawn from hourly records: dawn, cloud, rain or snow, the temperature running underneath. Drag to scrub through the hours.
The day you were born, a first day of school, a wedding. Keep a day with a caption, play it again without a connection, or save its card as an image through the share sheet.
How a question looks
Winter · Childhood · 1991–1997
Which of these seven Christmases were white?
Then and now · 2019–2025
Illustration of the reveal with made-up numbers. It is not a screenshot and not data for any real town.
Where the weather comes from
Neve Vesper reads the Open-Meteo Historical Weather API, which serves the ERA5 and ERA5-Land reanalysis: a reconstruction of past weather computed from millions of historical observations, hour by hour, back to 1940.
The reconstruction lives on a grid of 9 to 25 kilometres. It is not a station in your street. In the mountains, by the sea, or for a thin layer of snow on one particular day, it can differ from what truly lay outside your window. That is why the app counts answers over whole seasons, allows a margin, and always says “in the archive” rather than “in fact”.
Weather data by Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0). Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information (ERA5, ERA5-Land).
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