WINTER HARDINESS
Estimated temperature band, not an official USDA zone.
BEFORE YOU PLANT
Check Your Climate for a Food Forest
Start with the cold. Check your region’s winter limits before you choose trees.
What is your food forest’s growing climate?
This free check estimates winter hardiness, frost season and chill hours worldwide from NASA POWER’s 1991–2020 temperatures. Use a town or coordinates. No account or email is needed.
Regional screening at roughly 50 km resolution. Not a forecast, official USDA zone or parcel-level advice.
Or enter latitude and longitude
Coordinates skip the geocoder. We round them to 2 decimals before requesting climate data.
Choose a place to see your regional climate. No email needed.
Places: © OpenStreetMap contributors via Nominatim. Climate: NASA POWER / MERRA-2.
Climate check questions
What does the climate check show?
It estimates winter hardiness, frost season and chill hours from NASA POWER 1991–2020 daily temperatures. It covers places worldwide and needs no account or email.
Can it predict frost on my land?
No. The roughly 50 km grid describes regional climate, not a forecast or parcel-level conditions. Check local records for elevation, coasts and frost pockets.
Is this an official USDA hardiness zone?
No. This is an estimated temperature band. US growers should use the official USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map as their reference.
FROST SEASON
CHILL HOURS · ESTIMATE
Daily sine estimate at 0–7.2°C. Not measured hourly chill or chill portions.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU
In the US? Use the official USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map.
This button records one anonymous click total, then opens Food Forest Planner with source attribution.
Sources, method & privacy
Climate: NASA POWER, MERRA-2 daily minimum and maximum air temperature, 1991–2020. The native grid is 0.5° × 0.625°, roughly 50 km. This is regional screening, not parcel-level advice or a forecast. Global coverage; mountains, islands, coasts and frost pockets need local records.
Hardiness uses the mean of 30 annual temperature minima. Frost means air temperature ≤0°C at 2 m, not ground frost. Dates are medians in frost years, not safe planting dates. Tropical, rare-frost and persistent-cold regions show a regional equivalent instead. Chill uses a sine curve between daily extremes, summed October–March north of the equator or April–September south. It cannot replace an hourly or Dynamic Model calculation.
The data was obtained from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Langley Research Center's Prediction Of Worldwide Energy Resources (POWER) project funded through the NASA Earth Science Division. The API includes service version and retrieval date.
Place search: © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL, via Nominatim. Search is submit-only, cached for 24 hours and limited globally to less than one upstream request per second. Please use towns, not private addresses.
No cookies, email collection, browser location access or third-party scripts. The Worker forwards only your search text to the geocoder, and rounded coordinates to NASA. Providers do not receive your browser IP from us. Cloudflare processes your connection IP. App request logs are disabled. Cached places expire after 24 hours; climate summaries after seven days. Daily cleanup removes expired storage within a further 24 hours. Click totals contain only UTC date and count, retaining the latest 90 date buckets. Repeated clicks count again; counts are not unique people.
US visitors: USDA PHZM is the official US reference.