Google Earth can now help you find out quirky details such as whether it was a rainy day or a sunny one when you were born, Press Trust of India reported.
Climate researchers at the University of East Anglia, UK, have made the world's temperature records, dating back to 1850, available via Google Earth.
According to PTI, the Climatic Research Unit Temperature Version 4 (CRUTEM4) land-surface air temperature dataset is one of the most widely used records of the climate system.
Users can now scroll around the world, zoom in on 6,000 weather stations, and view monthly, seasonal and annual temperature data more easily than ever before through the new Google Earth format.
Users can also drill down to see some 20,000 graphs - some of which show temperature records dating back to 1850, PTI reported.
The move is part of an ongoing effort to make data about past climate and climate change as accessible and transparent as possible.
"The beauty of using Google Earth is that you can instantly see where the weather stations are, zoom in on specific countries, and see station datasets much more clearly," Tim Osborn from UEA's Climatic Research Unit said.
The Google Earth interface shows how the globe has been split into 5 degrees Celsius latitude and longitude grid boxes, according to PTI.
Narrowing towards the North and South poles, the boxes are about 550km wide along the Equator. "This red and green checker-board covers most of the Earth and indicates areas of land where station data are available," PTI reported.
The area's annual temperatures and more detailed downloadable station data are revealed by clicking on a grid box.
But while the new initiative does allow greater accessibility, the research team do expect to find errors.
"This dataset combines monthly records from 6,000 weather stations around the world - some of which date back more than 150 years. That's a lot of data, so we would expect to see a few errors. We very much encourage people to alert us to any records that seem unusual," Osborn said.
The initiative is published in the journal Earth System Science Data, PTI reported.
