The Weather Project
It all begins with an idea and a hobby, the weather has been an interest of mine for as long as I can remember and whilst I’m no meteorologist, you do pick up a few tricks over time. Over the past decade or so, I’ve increasingly applied my interest in the weather and my abilities in Excel and data handling to predict the weather for specific locations and ground truth the numerical weather prediction (NWP) data against local weather stations. Still, it was/is time consuming to apply to many locations, let alone put this information into a website and maintain it, whilst working full time elsewhere and being busy in life. Still, I always thought there might be something in it, something to share and maybe even at some point, be a side-earning hobby.
Enter AI - now I’m not a programmer, although, with hindsight, it’s something I should have learned. But I am good with tech and my experiences with Excel taught me something about formulas and checking logic. To streamline the Excel side of the analysis, I had AI write VBA script, and with some trial and error, I got the results I wanted. But then the wheels start turning, could I use Python to automate the extraction of the NWP data from GFS and convert it into a format that my spreadsheets can ingest? Could Python manage the Excel sheets in combination with the VBA? If I could do that, could I take the analysis of the spreadsheets, apply it directly in Python, plot it onto maps, and cover large areas rather than just single points? Turns out the answer was yes to all. While the maps can’t and don’t apply the ground truthing to surface temperatures like the spreadsheets do, the calculations for chill hours, frost risk, atmospheric instability, thunderstorm risk, snow settling levels, and more (to come), could be. The beauty of it was that it could also be largely automated.
Further automating the process to get that information from me to this website was another challenge - I don’t have the time to update that many images/maps manually. Enter AI and Google Cloud.
But here it is! It’s expandable and open to an endless list of ideas, if you have something you’d like to see and I think it’s doable, then it might eventually get up.