Climatology Plugin Data Sources

[waqas.qazi]

Hey all,

Sorry if this info is already somewhere in the forum, I couldn't find it after using the search bar for 20 minutes and also after going through the plugin page on the OpenCPN web page. I'm interested in knowing the data sources being used in the Climatology plug-in, specifically:

- Where is the data being pulled from to form the climatology, what climate services are being used?
- Is the data being pulled at a regular frequency, i.e daily, weekly, etc., or it requires a manual process

Anyone can help me answer these questions?

Thanks,
Waqas.

[rgleason]

It is not found in the forum. Try the Manual for the Plugin, it is there.

By the way, would you mind explaining your interest?

[waqas.qazi]

Thanks, I'm looking at the plug-in manual page, there is lot of info there, but unfortunately no clear description of data sources:

https://opencpn.org/wiki/dokuwiki/do...er:climatology

I'm working as part of a research group at Chalmers Univ., Sweden, and we are evaluating sailing weather+climate route optimisation services, and the OpenCPN climatology plugin tool looks really interesting! Wondering what kind of various / fixed data input sources this plugin pulls in data from to function?

[rgleason]

Warning about use of Data

Weather_routing is only as good as the data provided by the Grib plugin and the Climatology plugin.

1. Climatology plugin: Depends on a separate set of files that must be downloaded, extracted and placed in the proper directory. Climatology data is generally averaged since the 1980's depending on data type and sources available (for example, Wind data is averaged 6 hr data since 1987). The entire source data set is over 180 gb, however after averaging and compression it becomes about 7mb. There are various macro factors which affect weather over a given season which should be considered, including El Nino, Gulf stream, etc. Climatology has averaged these effects.
2. These planning tools may be helpful, but should be taken with a healthy “grain of salt” as any good sailor (who looks out to the horizon) should know. -Rick Gleason

Sean D'Epagnier is the programmer and I worked on this. I basically downloaded 130gb of data from a number of sources (a lot of it NOAA databases & other sources that were public opensource) for each parameter, spanning about 32 years of data. Sean was the mastermind, and would give me linux programs to compress the data. He manage to get the 130gb down to about 7mb which is used in Sean's plugin "Climatology".

If you would like, I might be able to find a more definitive list of our sources, but because this particular data landscape has changed over the years since doing it, some of the sources may have morphed, merged, changed or dropped.

The data is "static" because at the time this was done "real time" data was really quite unheard of.

Look at this thread

http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/f134/climatology-database-search-104418-2.html#post1319396

and back at the beginning of this thread

http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/...gy-102281.html

For some of the things we were considering.

[rgleason]

This post may be some help.
http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/...ml#post1319241

Also the bottom of this post

http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/...ml#post1251798

[rgleason]

If you know of good public sources for world wide

Shipping Routes & Heavy Shipping
Fog
Lightning
Piracy
Maritime Distress SART reporting

[seandepagnier]

If you click "config" from the climatology dialog and see the "about" tab the sources are listed.

[waqas.qazi]

Thanks all, this is great info for what I needed to know.

[SoggyPaws]

With the current warming trend in the world, it seems like weather patterns are changing pretty quickly.

It must have been a massive effort to put the Climatology database together (thank you very much!!), and I know how much the location of and access to the data has been changing...

Wondering if there is planned an attempt to update the data, especially the hurricane/cyclone/typhoon tracks. The Source Forge database was posted in 2015, so it probably only contains data up to around 2014??

Thanks for all you do, guys!!

Sherry

[seandepagnier]

Yes, actually my plan to display changing patterns.

Maybe the easiest is a checkbox to use either the full 30 years, or only the last 10. 10 years is not long enough, so anomalies will exist.

Otherwise, what would you suggest the best way to highlight changing weather patterns?

[LeaseOnLife]

From what I read above (soggypaws, thank you), currently the cyclone data are only up to 2014? I am on the E Pacific side of Central America and have looked at early season tracks on this side via:


https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tracks...s-ep-2018a.png
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tracks...s-ep-2017a.png
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tracks...s-ep-2016a.png
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tracks...s-ep-2015a.png


This quick check seems to confirm, data from 2015 - 2018 are missing in climatology_pi. This is crucial, since hurricanes tracked earlier and closer to shore, vs the years before.



I am all for the having a select-able year-range to display cyclone tracks. But having the newer data included in the database is more important, since the cyclone do appear earlier.



I tried to follow the link for data sources (www.unisys.com) but there website is cumbersome to find anything from there.


Dirk

[seandepagnier]

Originally Posted by LeaseOnLife

From what I read above (soggypaws, thank you), currently the cyclone data are only up to 2014? I am on the E Pacific side of Central America and have looked at early season tracks on this side via:


https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tracks...s-ep-2018a.png
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tracks...s-ep-2017a.png
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tracks...s-ep-2016a.png
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tracks...s-ep-2015a.png


This quick check seems to confirm, data from 2015 - 2018 are missing in climatology_pi. This is crucial, since hurricanes tracked earlier and closer to shore, vs the years before.

yes

I am all for the having a select-able year-range to display cyclone tracks. But having the newer data included in the database is more important, since the cyclone do appear earlier.



I tried to follow the link for data sources (www.unisys.com) but there website is cumbersome to find anything from there.


Dirk

I don't know about a few years of missing cyclone data making a huge difference in the cyclone areas but it is nice and the weather trends are changing this fast, then the next few years will have even less predictable weather making climatology less useful



I have not the time to update it now but gladly accept pull requests to the climatology data repository on github.

[rgleason]

I believe Sean made these tracks into a text file which was then processed to be compresed in a database form.
Is there an example of the format needed Sean?

[LeaseOnLife]

gencyclonedata.cpp currently points to

/*
weather.unisys.com has:
       tracks.epa   tracks.nio
       tracks.atl tracks.wpa  tracks.she 
       tracks.spa.dat -- is concatination of all the files in that folder
*/

But I have had no luck finding these files there. Is above still valid?

[LeaseOnLife]

plus, Climate-Data-Process.txt has a lot of text, but points to local shares on someones PC, not so helpful. It also says: Download the "cyclone-data.tar.bz2" file, but from where?