RHOK Oxford - next steps

Now I've had a few evenings fiddling with the code and ideas generated at RHoK Oxford two weeks ago I have something that I'll be able to demonstrate to my Met Office colleagues in the new year.  The URL for anyone who'd like to try it out is http://floodsourcerhok.appspot.com/

The simple idea here is to make weather data from global reanalysis available to help develop flood forecast models. See http://www.rhok.org/solutions/floodsource for more information.

What happens next isn't certain but I'm optimistic that something along these lines will available soonish.

RHoK Oxford - FloodSource

Ok guys - here's the idea....


And here's some data...

What you see plotted here is sub-daily precipitation data from the 20th Century reanalysis. Before going to Oxford I had a prototype API for extracting mean monthly data.  Now there's an improved version that can extract sub-daily data for a range of variables including precipitation, temperature and soil moisture.
The above example is for Cambodia in August 2007.  There was a major flood on the 24th August.

Giant leap - Random Hacks of Kindness, Oxford

Over the next few evenings I'll draw together some of the work on the FloodSource project at Random Hacks of Kindness, Oxford.



Here's a visualisation of the cleaned up CSV file of global floods presented in Google Fusion Tables. The information shown is from Dartmouth Flood Observatory.

Small moves - an introduction

Here are a few slides to stimulate discussion around weather, climate, models and humanitarian work.  Not quite finished yet - please comment.

Small moves - adding the reanalysis data

Here's the next step in my gradual development of an API for easy access to historical weather data.

The interactive demo is at http://www.saunby.net/climat-rean.html so please do try it out and leave comments here, or email me.

The next "small move" will most likely be combining this data with other data.  What I'd really like to see is this data combined with datasets of the impact of weather events such as droughts, floods, landslides and wild fires.  That might just happen at #RHOK on the 3rd December 2011 - not long now.

Small moves - CLIMAT data in Fusion Tables

Converting, uploading and merging the CLIMAT records from here - http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/crutem3/data/station_updates/ proved quite simple, so I set about building a test web page http://saunby.net/climat-layer-fusiontables-query.html 

My next "small move"?   I like being able to query a table and then simply show the resulting data in a graph, as above,  so I'll have a go at doing the same with 20th Century Reanalysis data.  

Small moves - WMO Publication No. 9, Volume A

Thinking ahead to RHoK in Oxford and reflecting on (h)activate in the summer - one of the things that pretty much everyone participating in a hackday needs is an API (or many) that does something useful.

So - what weather APIs already exist?

For current weather and short range forecasts there are several to choose from -

http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/04/15/5-weather-apis-from-weatherbug-to-weather-channel/

Yahoo also has one for forecasts http://developer.yahoo.com/weather/

These are nice, but I couldn't make worthwhile use of them in my work, so maybe there's a niche still remaining for climate and historical weather records. An API for all of that would be a big project. So, small moves...

How about a map of all WMO recognised observing stations from WMO Publication No. 9, Volume A?

Here you go -

https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?snapid=S316216Iz7P

As I've used Google's Fusion Tables getting KML is easy too - https://www.google.com/fusiontables/exporttable?query=select+col2+from+2146249+&o=kmllink&g=col2

Next small move? Getting CLIMAT reports from CRUTEM3 into a table.

Who? What? When? Where? Why?

An Englishman, Irishman and an Indian came together at the Guardian (h)activate hack day. We went away with prizes for our W5 mashup. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/blog/2011/jun/21/hactivate-developers-mashup-results for more information. More importantly see http://mulqueeny.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/whats-the-point-of-a-hack-day/ for why it, sort of, matters.

Future Perfect » Cairo Jewelry

Future Perfect » Cairo Jewelry