Mapping the world’s climate for travelers
I’m on a mission of building the ultimate app for deciding when to travel. It’s called ClimateList and its main component is a map showing the location of the best weather for each month of the year.
Origen: Mapping the world’s climate for travelers by Bastien Petit
How it works
I compute a “Best weather” indicator based on the average temperatures and precipitations in each country. The green color indicates a country where the weather is not too cold, not too hot, and not too rainy for a particular month:
The Challenge
Large countries generally have multiple climates.
In Algeria for example, the North has a Warm Mediterranean climate, but the South — the Sahara desert — has a Warm Desert climate.
To create a meaningful visualization, I need to split large countries into climate zones and compute average weather metrics for each zone.
The Process
For each country, I need to:
1 — Research the climate
The most useful ressources are the Köppen classification, temperature, and precipitation maps.
2 — Define climate zones
For Algeria, I decide to go with 2 zones named “North” and “South”. I use QGIS to separate the existing geometry in 2 areas.
3 — Compute weather metrics
After importing the new geometry, I launch a few tasks computing the average temperatures and precipitations on 10 years for each new zone. This takes a few hours to complete because it relies on searching data through 3 large NetCDF files downloaded from Worldbank.org.
4 — Check the results
I verify that my recommendations match the travel advice found online and are consistent with the weather in nearby countries.
Here is what the new country looks like:
Let’s get started
The quality of the recommendations on ClimateList will depend a lot on getting these climate zones right. I will need to repeat this process for around 30 countries.
I’m not sure yet how successful this approach will be. Some countries have a complex arrangement of many different climates and simplifying them in a few meaningful zones is far from obvious. But I really want to see this visualization come to life, so I’ll try!
I’ll share the progress here, starting with China, India, and Australia.
I’d love to hear you opinion. I’m trying to build a useful service and did quite a lot of research on this topic. But I’m not a climatologist and I may have overlooked something. Let me know what you think!
Workom es la web de búsqueda y reserva de mesas de trabajo, oficinas privadas, salas de juntas, aulas y más espacios de trabajo, perfectos para ti, en cualquier lugar, ciudad o país. Descubre tu Espacios de Trabajo y resérvalo por el tiempo que necesites, horas, días o meses de forma rápida y segura.
Originally published at The Workyager.
