How to play

Each day you'll be presented with five cities. Your job is to guess the current temperature in each of them, at the moment you make your guess. After you lock in a guess, the true current temperature is revealed. A new daily arrives at midnight, your time.

Each city is shown on the globe alongside its local time, elevation, and current weather. These should help you narrow down your guess; there's more on how to do that below.

Your score, in degrees, is the distance between your guess and the current temperature, so the lower the better. Your total is the sum across all five guesses. In the daily, a total under 50°F (28°C) is solid, and under 20°F (11°C) is incredible. At the end you can see how your score compares to other players and to your own previous attempts.

You can play in either Fahrenheit or Celsius, whichever you're comfortable with. Scores convert automatically when they're compared against everyone else.

If you still want to test your skill after the daily, Unlimited keeps dealing random cities. And since the weather is always changing, you can keep going until you're all weathered out.

Tips and tricks on how to become a weather wizard

• Learn the climate zones. The Köppen map splits the world into climate types, and cities in the same type behave alike. A desert city like Baghdad is very hot in summer and gets cold at night in winter. Singapore is tropical and stays in the 80s all year. Vancouver has an oceanic climate, so it never gets very hot or very cold and doesn't change much between day and night. Knowing the zone gets you most of the way. Then it comes down to details, like whether the city is on the coast or inland, whether it's rainy season, or whether it sits on the border of another zone.
• Look at the clock. Nights are cooler and days are warmer, but how much depends on the climate. Deserts and high-altitude cities can swing 30 degrees in a day. Humid tropical and oceanic cities barely move. Most places hit their low just before sunrise and their high in the mid to late afternoon.
• Check the weather icon. Clouds and rain hold the temperature in the middle: cooler afternoons, warmer nights, a smaller range. Clear skies do the opposite, so a clear afternoon runs hotter and a clear night runs colder than you'd expect.
• Don't forget altitude. There's a reason the tops of mountains are white. Air gets colder as you go up, by about 3.5°F for every 1,000 feet (6.5°C per 1,000 meters). Mexico City is at 7,300 feet and Bogotá at 8,600, which is why both are much cooler than you'd guess from the map. Look at the elevation before you commit.
• Expect the fronts to move. You can know a city's climate by heart and still get caught by a heat wave or a cold snap. If you want to see where the weather is unusual today, a global map like Ventusky will show you. Don't worry, we won't tell.

Why was my friend's actual temperature different from mine?

Because Degrees uses the real weather at the time of your game. The temperature is whatever it is in that city at the moment you lock in, and it updates every 15 minutes. If your friend played two hours after you, Dublin may have warmed up or cooled down in between. You each guessed against the real conditions at your moment.

Know someone who'd be good at this?

Help grow our community and share with friends.