Are weather questions on topic?

Question

Occasionally we get questions asking about weather, and how one ought to dress in a particular region during a particular time of year.

The most recent example: Thailand in October - Weather

We've had an inconsistent policy on these. Some have been closed, with the rationale that meteorology is not travel, and that weather forecasts and historical weather data are both available from other sources. Others have remained open, unmolested.

Should questions about weather be permitted? If there's a distinction between those which should, and shouldn't, what is it?

The only current example of a closed weather question I can find is this: Chicago's summertime weather

But most closed questions like this get automatically purged after a while, so I wouldn't expect there to be much extant evidence.

There are many others which are still open, some with close votes.

Answer 1

Generally, weather questions should be fine, unless OP asks for the weather on a particular day/week, which is of course too localized. The closed question you link to gets into the nitty-gritty details of weather forecasting, and I assume that's the reason it was closed.

People live in different climates, and may have different expectations about the weather at a particular place. When I lived in Sweden, I found it amusing that people from e.g. Southeast Asia have never seen snow in their lives and didn't know what to wear, etc.

Weather is not just about the temperature at a particular place -- relative humidity, windiness, % cloudy days, rainfall frequency and quantity are all of importance, and while numerical data shouldn't be hard to come by, actually understanding what the numbers mean can be tricky for non-meteorologists. For this reason alone, I think those questions should be allowed on Travel-SE.

Answer 2

My only feeling at the moment is a lot of the questions being asked could be solved with 10 minutes prior research. A quick search for "climate graph [destination]" would proivde enough detail to answer at least half of these questions. Possible opportunity for a cannonical answer and close those that just ask "what is weather like in [place] during [month]?" as duplicates?

Those that ask more specific questions (i.e. How does monsoon season affect X/how is travel affected by this weather/would clothing item Y be helpful in [place]'s climate?) would still be novel and relevant.