So I’ve now been predicting the weather for a week, and well all I can say is. I’m pretty damn good at it.
I wrote a script to go back in the database, and using the same logic as my current predicting script. It looks at data that would have been available to the system then, and puts a prediction in the database. This was marked as retrospective (although in theory it doesn’t matter).
Here is some output of my results at the time of writing
Predicting the weather is a difficult task, often taking years of training. Then hours of studying charts, tides to predict weather we are going to be wearing shorts or trousers tomorrow.
I decided to take a more basic approach to attempt to guesstimate what the weather is going to do.
Taking baby steps, I am only predicting 12 hours in the future. But below I will outline the method in my madness.
Because I have little other content to put up, I’m just leaving a note about another website I run with Jason, Is The Storm Coming?.
The whole idea of this website, came from a saying at work. So we bought the domain, and wondered what to do with it. Eventually we came up with the idea of scraping a weather website, and searching for key words.
Firstly, I hacked something together in PHP. It took all of about 20 minutes, and the website was live.
Obviously the information provided is only for Guernsey, in the Channel Islands, but it provides a simple yes or no answer on weather to stay indoors.
In January, Jason recoded it all in Ruby on Rails. We also tarted the thing up with a nice graph showing storm frequency. This uses the google API, and although Jason needs to get on it and fix the labels on the axis, the scales are good, and now there is nearly 3 months worth of data in the graph, its actually interesting what shape it takes.
The future plans I think are to use an algorithm similar to the one used by the Rock, Paper, Scissors Bot to predict the weather.
Accurate, No
A bit of Fun, Yes
Well, its the 1st of December, and we have had small amout of snow in Guernsey. Enough for me to not want to drive to work, call me wet, but this is Guernsey. Snow is srsbsns
This was the view out of my front door this morning:
