upcomming trends plugin

[seandepagnier]

I am starting a new plugin to display long term weather trends.

Sort of like the wind atlas. There will be many modes of display, but the basic one has wind barbs in the 8 directions with lengths relative to the percentage of time, and barbs showing strength. Then in the center is either in red, the percentage of time over 40 knots, or else, in blue the percentage of time under 5 knots whichever is more.

There will also be a displays showing all the past tropical storm tracks, and typical ITCZ position. Then a list to select which month of the year, or all months. It may be helpful to have a box to select el nino/la nina or both

Next it might be possible to show relevant ocean currents sea temperatures, rainfall patterns, and possibly swell. Am I forgetting anything?

Now for the critical bit.. does anyone know where I can get the data I need? Should I just download as many gribs as I possibly can and generate it from that? Please post as many sources for possible data so I can implement this.

[dougwm10]

What you are proposing is already available in Visual Passenger Planner 2 but this is a commercial package but its well worth your looking at it.

[seandepagnier]

Originally Posted by dougwm10

What you are proposing is already available in Visual Passenger Planner 2 but this is a commercial package but its well worth your looking at it.

Do you know what data they use? Is that data freely available for use in opencpn?

[seandepagnier]

I realize that pilot charts are already available for opencpn:
Pilot Charts for Chart Plotters | Official OpenCPN Homepage

unfortunately these are raster charts

The problems:
so data interpolation (between points) as well as months not possible
optimal routing of courses for passages also not possible
use a large amount of disk space for a small amount of data
is not convenient to flip through months as charts in this way
can't overlay on a chart and have various display options..
my list continues.. but I'll stop here

I'm looking for the data used to generate these pilot charts

[nohal]

Sean...
Are you crunching Climatology of Global Ocean Winds - COGOW data? I had some fun playing with it before (the raw data is A LOT of small text files), but never had time to actually produce something useful... Very nice idea indeed.

Pavel

[cagney]

boat_alexandra

Nohal is right, COGOW is the way to go. Pilotchart data has not been updated since about 1970, or so, IIRCC.
COGOW is based on the now dead QuickScat.
The available option now is Ascat ->The Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) Data Products

Something about currents here -> Ocean Surface Currents

Generally I think that it will pay off for us to check out the websites of Universities with meteorological and oceanographic programs.

Thomas