Predicting stuff involving the next hour of my life
Rain-on-me is an idea for an App that I have had for a while and have been trying to get people interested in it at Hackathons I attend. At the Techcrunch hackathon last weekend my pitch convinced Rob Finean, who I worked with at the Climate change hack, and we ended up winning in the Intel Mashery category (we used the wunderground API to get our realtime data).
The Rain-on-me idea is to use realtime rain data to predict how much rain will occur at my current location over the next hour or so (we divided the hour up into five minute intervals). This country, and others, has weather enthusiasts who operate their own weather stations and the data from these stations has been aggregated by the Weather Underground and made available on the Internet. Real-time data from local weather stations upwind of me could be used to predict what rain I am going to experience in the near future.
Anybody who has looked at weather station data, amateur or otherwise, knows that measured wind direction/speed can be surprisingly variable and that sometimes sensor stop reporting. But this is a hack, so lets be optimistic; station reporting intervals seem to be around 30 minutes, with some reporting every 15 mins and others once an hour, which is theory is good enough for our needs.
What really caught peoples’ attention was the simplicity of the user interface (try it and/or download code):
Being techies we were working on a design that showed quantity of rain and probability of occurring (this was early on and I had grand plans for modeling data from multiple stations). Rob had a circular plot design and Manoj (team member on previous hacks who has been bitten by the Raspberry pi bug) suggested designing it to run on a smart watch; my only contribution to the design was the use of five minute intervals.
The simplicity of the data presentation allows viewers to rapidly obtain a general idea of the rain situation in their location over the next hour (the hour is measured from the location of the minute hand; the shades of blue denote some combination of quantity of rain and probability of occurring).
This is the first App I’ve seen that actually makes sense on a smart watch. In fact if the watches communicated rain status at their current location then general accuracy over the next hour could become remarkably good.
Rainfall is only one of the things in my life that I would like predicted for the next hour. I want British rail to send me the predicted arrival time of the train I am on my way to catch (I may not need to rush so much if it is a few minutes late), when is the best time, in the next hour, to turn up at my barber for a hair cut (I want minimum waiting time after I arrive), average number of bikes for hire at my local docking station (should I leave now or is it safe to stay where I am a bit longer), etc.
Predicting events in the next hour of people’s lives is the future of Apps!
The existing rain-on-me implementation is very primitive; it uses the one weather station having the shortest perpendicular distance from the line going through the current location coming from the current wind direction (actually the App uses an hour of Saturday’s data since it was not raining on the Sunday lunchtime when we presented). There is plenty of room for improving the prediction reliability.
Other UK weather data sources include the UK Metoffice which supplies rainfall radar and rainfall predictions at hourly intervals for the next five days (presumably driven from the fancy whole Earth weather modeling they do); they also have an API for accessing hourly data from the 150 sites they operate.
The Weather Underground API is not particularly usable for this kind of problem. The call to obtain a list of stations close to a given latitude/longitude gives the distance (in miles and kilometers, isn’t there a formula to convert one to the other) of those station from what looks like the closest large town, so a separate call is needed for each station id to get their actual location!!! Rather late in the day I found out that the UK Metoffice has hidden away (or at least not obviously linked to) the Weather Observations Website which appears to be making available data from amateur weather stations.
Recent Posts
Tags
Archives
- November 2024
- October 2024
- September 2024
- August 2024
- July 2024
- June 2024
- May 2024
- April 2024
- March 2024
- February 2024
- January 2024
- December 2023
- November 2023
- October 2023
- September 2023
- August 2023
- July 2023
- June 2023
- May 2023
- April 2023
- March 2023
- February 2023
- January 2023
- December 2022
- November 2022
- October 2022
- September 2022
- August 2022
- July 2022
- June 2022
- May 2022
- April 2022
- March 2022
- February 2022
- January 2022
- December 2021
- November 2021
- October 2021
- September 2021
- August 2021
- July 2021
- June 2021
- May 2021
- April 2021
- March 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- December 2020
- November 2020
- October 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- July 2020
- June 2020
- May 2020
- April 2020
- March 2020
- February 2020
- January 2020
- December 2019
- November 2019
- October 2019
- September 2019
- August 2019
- July 2019
- June 2019
- May 2019
- April 2019
- March 2019
- February 2019
- January 2019
- December 2018
- November 2018
- October 2018
- September 2018
- August 2018
- July 2018
- June 2018
- May 2018
- April 2018
- March 2018
- February 2018
- January 2018
- December 2017
- November 2017
- October 2017
- September 2017
- August 2017
- July 2017
- June 2017
- May 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- January 2017
- December 2016
- November 2016
- October 2016
- September 2016
- August 2016
- July 2016
- June 2016
- May 2016
- April 2016
- March 2016
- February 2016
- January 2016
- December 2015
- November 2015
- October 2015
- September 2015
- August 2015
- July 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- April 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- December 2014
- November 2014
- October 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- July 2014
- June 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- September 2013
- August 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
Recent Comments