Methodology, data sources and licences
This page documents how the climate time-series tools produce each output, the licence and required credit for every dataset, the limits applied to interactive requests and the terms on which outputs may be reused. Licences were last checked on the providers' own pages on 27 October 2026.
Datasets
A dataset is offered only where its licence, as published by the data provider, permits commercial use and redistribution of derived outputs. Data are read directly from open cloud archives at the time of each request; nothing is redistributed in its original form.
ERA5 reanalysis
Monthly 2 m air temperature and precipitation at a point since 1940, aggregated from hourly ERA5 reanalysis on a 0.25° grid, plus annual warming stripes against the 1991–2020 mean.
Required credit, included on every output:
Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2026. Neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use that may be made of the Copernicus information or data it contains. Hersbach, H. et al. (2023): ERA5 hourly data on single levels from 1940 to present, Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) Climate Data Store, https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.adbb2d47. Accessed through Icechunk ERA5 by Earthmover (CC BY 4.0), https://registry.opendata.aws/earthmover-era5/.
CHIRPS v3 rainfall
Daily satellite and station rainfall estimates at 0.05° (about 5.5 km) between 60° N and 60° S, aggregated to monthly totals and anomalies against 1991–2020.
Required credit, included on every output:
UCSB Climate Hazards Center CHIRPS version 3.0 data processed by dynamical.org from the Climate Hazards Center data archive. Funk, C., Peterson, P., Harrison, L. et al. The Climate Hazards Center Infrared Precipitation with Stations, Version 3. Sci Data 13, 718 (2026). Data: https://doi.org/10.15780/G2JQ0P. Licensed under CC BY 4.0; aggregated by TechnicalGIS.
Sentinel-2 L2A imagery
10 m surface reflectance from Copernicus Sentinel-2, using the least-cloudy acquisition in each period. True colour or NDVI.
Required credit, included on every output:
Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2026.
Landsat Collection 2 Level-2
30 m surface reflectance from Landsat 5, 7, 8 and 9 since 1984, using the least-cloudy acquisition in each period. True colour or NDVI.
Required credit, included on every output:
Landsat imagery courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.
MODIS vegetation index (MOD13Q1)
16-day 250 m NDVI composites from the Terra MODIS instrument since 2000, as a point or small-area mean series.
Required credit, included on every output:
MODIS MOD13Q1 v061 NDVI: Didan, K. (2021). NASA EOSDIS Land Processes DAAC. https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MOD13Q1.061. Use does not imply endorsement by NASA.
Processing
ERA5 temperature, precipitation and warming stripes
Hourly 2 m air temperature and total precipitation are read for the 0.25° grid cell containing the chosen point, from a copy of ERA5 arranged for time-series access, and aggregated to monthly means (temperature) or monthly totals (precipitation). Values are for the grid cell, about 28 km across, and are not a substitute for a weather station at the exact location. Warming stripes show each year's mean temperature as a difference from the 1991–2020 average for the same cell, following the convention popularised by Ed Hawkins; the final year is shown only when complete.
CHIRPS rainfall anomalies
Daily CHIRPS version 3 rainfall is summed to monthly totals for the point or the mean of the area, and compared with the 1991–2020 monthly normal for the same pixels. The anomaly map shows each period's total as a percentage of normal. CHIRPS covers land between 60° S and 60° N.
Sentinel-2 and Landsat time-lapses
For each frame period (monthly, quarterly or annual) the service searches the archive for scenes covering the area with less than 60% cloud cover, chooses the clearest acquisition date, and mosaics every scene from that date onto a common grid at the selected pixel size. Pixels classed as cloud, cloud shadow or missing (the Sentinel-2 scene classification layer, or the Landsat QA band) are shown in grey. True colour uses a fixed reflectance stretch so frames are comparable; NDVI is computed from the red and near-infrared bands. Periods with no usable scene are reported in the output notes rather than failing the request. Pixel sizes coarser than the native resolution are read from the archives' overviews, which keeps requests fast.
MODIS vegetation index
The MOD13Q1 16-day NDVI composite is read at 250 m for the point, or averaged over the area. Pixels flagged in the reliability layer as cloud, snow or ice, or missing, are excluded, and the number of excluded composites is reported.
Outputs
Charts are produced as PNG with the underlying values as CSV; time-lapses are produced as MP4 and GIF, with a PNG poster frame and a CSV listing the scene used for every frame. Every output carries the line "Generated at TechnicalGIS.com" and the dataset credit.
Limits and fair use
The service runs on shared infrastructure, so interactive requests are bounded: each frame is limited to 1 million pixels and 36 frames, imagery animations also have a total work budget (pixels per frame multiplied by frames), each job is stopped after 90 seconds of processing, and each visitor may run one job at a time and up to 15 a day. Up to 8 jobs can wait in the queue; when it is full, or when the server is under load, new requests are asked to try again shortly. Results are kept for 7 days, and identical recent requests are served from stored results. Requests are protected by Cloudflare Turnstile and rate limits.
For larger areas, longer periods, finer resolutions, other datasets or scheduled updates, request bespoke processing.
Terms for reusing outputs
Outputs generated with these tools, including the items in the gallery, may be used, shared and adapted for any purpose, including commercially, on the following conditions:
- the line "Generated at TechnicalGIS.com" is kept with the output, or given alongside it where the output is cropped or re-plotted;
- the dataset credit shown with the output is kept, as each dataset's licence requires;
- the output is not presented as endorsed by TechnicalGIS or by any data provider.
Outputs are provided as they are, without warranty. They are derived from reanalysis, satellite and gridded estimates, which contain known uncertainties, and are not suitable on their own for safety-critical, engineering or legal decisions.
Pre-computed and rejected sources
NASA NEX-GDDP-CMIP6 projections (gallery only)
NASA Earth Exchange, via the NASA Center for Climate Simulation THREDDS service. Licence: CC0 1.0 (all models since September 2022) . Credit: NASA Earth Exchange Global Daily Downscaled Projections (NEX-GDDP-CMIP6). Thrasher, B. et al. (2022). Sci Data 9, 262. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01393-4. Use does not imply endorsement by NASA.
The following sources were assessed and not offered interactively in this phase:
- TerraClimate: The provider's own site (climatologylab.org) states no licence; only third-party catalogues describe it as CC0, which does not meet the provider-page rule. The Planetary Computer copy also ends in December 2021.
- Daymet V4: Licence acceptable (NASA, no restrictions), but coverage is North America only and the Planetary Computer copy ends in 2020; deferred to phase 2.
- Open-Meteo API: The free API tier is restricted to non-commercial use.
- ARCO-ERA5 (Google Cloud): Licence acceptable, but every store is chunked one time step over the whole globe, so a point time series would read the full archive. Earthmover's time-series-chunked Icechunk edition is used instead.
- ERA5 (Microsoft Planetary Computer era5-pds): Licence acceptable, but the Zarr stores are chunked 372 hours ? 150 ? 150 cells and end in 2020; a point read costs about 67 MB per month, and a 120-month series exceeded the 90-second job limit on the production server (683 MB peak). Replaced by Earthmover's Icechunk ERA5.
- NEX-GDDP-CMIP6 (interactive): Licence acceptable, but cloud copies are chunked by day over the globe (about 20 s per model-year for one point), and per-request extraction from the NASA THREDDS service would place repeated load on a public research server. Offered as pre-computed gallery items only in phase 1.