Methodology
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Before you trust a number, read its label.
Every figure on this site carries a status word saying what kind of number it is — because the difference between a live reading, an official release and an illustration matters more than the number itself.
The status vocabulary
- Live
- Read from an operational feed within the last few hours.
- Official latest
- The most recent official release. Real, but published on the agency's schedule — not today's reading.
- Forecast
- A projection about the future. It may not happen.
- Computed
- Derived by this project from named source data — the method is documented.
- Documented
- A static figure taken from an official or credible published source.
- Illustrative
- Prototype numbers that show what a section will look like. Not measurements.
- Unavailable
- We want this number, and no current source can support it.
- Research
- Being investigated. Nothing shown yet because nothing is verified yet.
The network behind the live readings
The climate chapter reads one reference point per state — fourteen points, at the state capitals. Temperature, rainfall and UV come from Open-Meteo; air quality from CAMS; anomalies are measured against a 1991–2020 ERA5 baseline computed once, offline, from 35 years of daily reanalysis. That is enough to see a national anomaly and far too coarse to see a thunderstorm — which is why every state page also says exactly which point its reading describes. Labuan and Putrajaya have no reference point of their own yet, and their profiles say that instead of borrowing a neighbour's value.
The house rules
No number without a source
Every figure traces to a named dataset in the source ledger. If we cannot cite it, we do not publish it — a blank space is more honest than a plausible guess.
Illustrative never looks live
Prototype data is labelled on the page, in the section, and again in the deep-data notes. It never drives a headline, an alert or a ranking presented as fact.
Stale data says its date
An annual statistic is never dressed up as today's reading. Where a release is old, the page says 'latest official data, as of …' rather than 'today'.
Gaps are shown, not filled
Where coverage ends — a territory without a reference point, a metric with no open feed — the page says so. We do not borrow a neighbour's value or interpolate one.
The full ledger of datasets, access methods and caveats is on the sources page. Every climate section also carries its own deep-data notes at the bottom.