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Weatherspark

In preparation for next month’s Faster Than Sound, we’ve been doing some analysis of the local area’s weather data from past years, to gain some insight into what the conditions are likely to be on the day. The gratifying part of this is producing graphical visualisations of weather patterns, which can often be aesthetically beautiful as well as useful for understanding underlying structure.

Here are a couple from last year’s research at Dungeness, representing the distribution of wind direction over a month:

winddir

winddir-may09

In looking into online approaches, we came across Weatherspark, which is an incredibly full-featured tool to look into current and historical meteorological trends around the world. It includes data from a weather station not too far from Aldeburgh, and can be filtered by numerous attributes: wind speed and direction, sun hours, temperature, dew point, humidity, precipitation, and more.

Screen shot 2011-04-28 at 21.27.03

It allows data from different stations to also be compared, and – in a really nice feature – generates written weather forecasts for any given day. Check it out for May 28th.

About Variable 4

Variable 4 is an outdoor sound installation that translates live weather conditions into an ever-changing piece of music, using weather sensors and custom software to generate and recombine thousands of musical fragments. Read more about the piece...