News items for tag weathermapsite - Koos van den Hout

I noticed that the entry for De Bilt, Netherlands at the weather.gladstonefamily.net site had recent weather data. I asked Philip Gladstone where he gets that data and searched around a bit myself. The answer is that this is synop (surface synoptic observations) data. The synop data format is ofcourse very different from the METAR format. Time to find good data sources, write another parser and see what this can do for http://weather.idefix.net/. Probably time to split the whole script that generates the weathermaps in several parts, fetching, parsing and caching data, drawing the resulting data on the map.

After a 'complaint' that temperatures were mapped to almost the same shades of green I tried to find a better way to map temperatures to colours for the weather maps on http://weather.idefix.net. What I learned sofar: visualizing temperatures in an easy to understand way is quite hard. The human perception is that blue is cold and red is hot. The current mapping uses that to map temperature to Hue values and use the resulting HSV colour (after conversion to RGB). Adding a legend showing what temperature maps to what colour helps a bit, but with the Netherlands being not too big an area for weather and with usually not much differences in temperature I keep ending up with close shades of the same colour. Interesting problem, and I can't find any published work about this sofar. Lots of research in 3d weather visualization, but no temperature to colour mapping information.

A few updates to the weather maps recently: The maps are now generated each hour and there is a list of the recent weather maps.

Updates to the logic behind the weather maps at http://weather.idefix.net/ and updates to the stations list. Data is now fetched from multiple sources and with a lot of searching I found the locations of a number of stations such as EHFS (Vlissingen), EHSC (Lichteiland Goeree) and EHKV (oilplatform K14-FA-1C). Starting tomorrow morning the updates will be visible in the generated maps.

The weather keeps me interested and I have been working on processing weather data (ofcourse using Geo::METAR). Roger Burton West did a lot of work on visualizing weather data and I updated the result for Geo::METAR. Resulting maps now available on http://weather.idefix.net/. Stuff to add: caching, getting data from several sources (at least one metar for the Netherlands isn't available via the US national weather service) or using different sources.