historic wind/ google maps

max · Post by **max** » Sat Oct 21, 2006 4:10 pm

I wrote a script to download historic METARs weather at various places in norcal, then average the daytime wind speeds and generate a google earth KML file... check it out:

and
heres the KML file

It's color coded and scaled according to how high the average is: big yellow diamonds=lots of wind, little red ones = not so much wind

this example is only for the last 300 days, but I am running one now for 2.5 years.

Greg · Post by **Greg** » Sat Oct 21, 2006 9:17 pm

you know Max if they find out you can do this..
this.., kind of stuff they might think your weird or worse-
put you to work! #-o
L.M.G.

berrisbob · Post by **berrisbob** » Sat Oct 21, 2006 9:24 pm

Too bad there aren't many data points close to sailing sites. Looking at the data, here is a breakdown of sites near the data points:

Sherman Island (Fairfield / Travis Air Force Base) - 16.2 = ave. wind speed
Alameda (Oakland, Metro Oakland International Airport) - 11.6 = ave. wind speed
Coyote Point (San Francisco, San Francisco International Airport) - 15.8 = ave. wind speed
3rd Avenue (San Carlos Airport) - 9.8 = ave. wind speed (probably not a very good indicator)

Unfortunately, that's it. But then again, we all pretty much know when and where it blows around here.

max · Post by **max** » Sat Oct 21, 2006 10:09 pm

LMG: too late :)

bob -- yeah it's pretty sparse, since they are mostly airports. I was actually doing this to try to find places to snowkite! I was hoping blue canyon would be good, but it looks weak. a while ago i found a site with links to public non-airport sensors in the same format, but i cant seem to find it now.

Blackbird · Post by **Blackbird** » Mon Oct 23, 2006 12:41 pm

Why not use the iKiteSurf historic data? They have years of files for all the wind sensors we rely upon...

max · Post by **max** » Mon Oct 23, 2006 1:28 pm

because not all of the sensors i was interested in are in ikitesurf. .. or if it is, I couldn't find it. Blue canyon/Emigrant gap is one example...

jjm · Post by **jjm** » Mon Oct 23, 2006 3:11 pm

max, I think I attempted the same thing last winter. I found some sites with data, but usually not in any common format (i.e. METAR).

I was going to do a mashup or something, but then Wunderground implemented it and I lost interest.

I think I found a (java) ibrary called JWeather on source forge that did the METAR handling (not sure if it would automagically connect to the FTP sites to collect the latest data files). You seem to have that covered though.

PM me if you're interested, I'll see if I have any code or notes lying around...

max · Post by **max** » Mon Oct 23, 2006 5:01 pm

thanks... i might be interested in that code if I can find some more interesting sensors in the sierra. As it is, I'm grabbing comma delimited text from wundergound (as you menioned) using perl/LWP so parsing etc is easy. The thing that took the most time was caching all the lookups -- not sure how wunderground feels about many thousands of hits on pages without ads.

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historic wind/ google maps

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