How to See What the Weather Was Like on the Day You Were Born

Dark Sky, which I first wrote about in 2014, is one of my favorite weather apps. It’s crazy accurate, and I love the fact that it warns me when rain or snow is about to start.

While jetlagged the other night in Germany, I was playing around with the Dark Sky app when I discovered, at the very bottom of a weather report, the words “TIME MACHINE.” Of course I tapped them, and boy was I pleasantly surprised. You can see projections of what the localized weather is going to be in the future (I stopped scrolling after year 3100 because that’s just crazy talk). Even more interesting with this feature, I thought, is the fact that you can go back in time to see the weather on the day you were born. Or any date, for that matter.

To use it, you pull up Dark Sky and type in a city (if you don’t want to let the app use your current location) and choose a date in the time machine. How many years you can go back seems to depend on the destination. Norwalk, Connecticut (where I’m from), for example, only went back to 1946 so I couldn’t look up the weather on my dad’s birthday there. But for each date that is available, Dark Sky provides a lot of information. In addition to the temperature and weather conditions, you can also see wind speed, humidity, dew point, UV index, cloud cover, and pressure.

One other cool feature: When you’re looking up the weather on the day you were born, the app also tells you the number of days that have passed between that date and the date you’re using the app! This means you can see how old you are in days. This feature is what my friend Leo Laporte found most interesting when I talked about Dark Sky on his The Tech Guy show. Leo looked up his birthday and found he was just shy of 23,000 days. Pretty cool, eh?

Want to see the weather on the day you were born?

Or just download a good weather app? Dark Sky isn’t free, but I think it’s totally worth the $4. It’s available for iOS and Android.