heatmap_weather

Heatmap to visualise weather data from London Heathrow

Historic [weather] Station Data is freely available to download from the MET office website here: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/historic-station-data

1. A heatmap to visualise weather data over the last 70 years at London Heathrow.

2. A heatmap to visualise a decade of total rainfall in mm each month.

3. A heatmap to visualise average monthly minimum temperature over 20 years.

Instructions for use:

Quick install using pip & requirements.txt (recommended)

Create a virtual environment and type this pip command at the command line.

pip install -r requirements.txt

1. To generate a heatmap to show the maximum temperatures over the last 70 years, run

python heathrow_weather_heatmap.py

Also prints the head of the data to the terminal.

2. To generate a heatmap to show the monthly total rainfall in mm over a specific decade, run

python heathrow_weather_data_grid.py

Also prints the numpy grid to the terminal.

3. To generate a heatmap using 3 specified arguments; start date, end date & selected column to view, run

python heathrow_weather_heatmap_alldata.py 2000 2020 2 

where start date is 2000, end date is 2020 and "2" denotes that we wish to view column 2 - Mean Daily Miniumum Temperature, also prints head and tail to terminal.

Challenges Overcome:

• Cleaning up the data by skipping the first 6 rows of written explanation of the data, renaming the columns, and removing the # symbol from the sunshine hours from September 2005 onwards. The # denoted use of an alternative sensor.
• Recognising how the numpy data grid generates the data and my axes are correctly labelled, e.g. January is in the right place.
• Coding in a defined centre point for a colourbar
• Researching the problem when the computer decides to default to 1970's time

Challenges yet to overcome:

• In order to use the data I had to manually remove all the data from 2021, stopping the data at December 2020 instead, as this created a column problem.
• Still working on air frost and total sunshine hours in the final example.