FetchClimate! Building a Geographical Web Service

A huge amount of climate data is available, covering the whole of the Earth surface. But even the experts find it ludicrously difficult to get the climate information they need: locate data sets, negotiate permissions, download huge files, make sense of file formats, get to grips with yet another library, filter, interpolate, regrid, etc! Enter FetchClimate, a fast, intelligent climate-data-retrieval service that operates over Windows Azure. FetchClimate can be used through a Silverlight web interface or from inside any .NET program. FetchClimate works at any grid resolution from global to a few kilometers, in a range of years from 1900 to 2010, on days within a year, and for hours within a day. When multiple data sources could answer your query, FetchClimate automatically selects the most appropriate, returning the requested values along with the level of uncertainty and the origin of the data. The entire query can be shared as a single URL, enabling others to retrieve the identical information.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[morbital]

This is very cool, useful tool for climate students ;)

[Spencer Sharkey]

Bing Maps..

Silverlight..

Internet Explorer..

Oh god.

[drewpurves]

Feedback on all aspects of FetchClimate is always very welcome. Note that FetchClimate is free, providing experts and non-experts alike with potentially useful information on 'climate', that is, statistics on the average weather patterns one encounters at different places and times (rather than short-term weather forecasts, which are easy to get elsewhere). It's this expectation that is needed for longer-term planning, e.g., of windfarms, solar panels, cropping plans, or holidays.

[David Reeves]

Interesting subject but have some misgivings.

1. Silverlight

2. Bing

3. Stored Data

So how is this helpful to a government planning a wind farm?

There are a lot of other tools out there that not only do what this app does, but predict current weather and future preditictions based on the data set.

I would have tried it out for real, although you even said Silverlight is dead so why should I download old software and install in my modern browser?

[OMGBONER94]

nice