Question: Seeking sources of local wind/weather data

warren is asking a question about air-quality
Follow this topic

by warren | February 14, 2019 19:01 | #18364


In Leaflet Environmental Layers (LEL), our new-ish library to display many different sources of local environmental data in a single map (read more at #leaflet-environmental-layers), we're showing a growing range of data, including government databases, community-collected air data, FracTracker reports, and much more.

But the weather (and specifically wind direction) data is not always very helpful --

See for example this map of Houston, on MapKnitter, which uses LEL (enable the Purple Air layer in the upper right corner menu):

image description

The wind data is from https://openweathermap.org, but it just doesn't show very many weather stations. It's even worse in rural areas:

image description

What are some sources of higher resolution wind data?

Note that some sites like OpenWeatherMap invite people to connect their weather stations, so the situation could improve as people join: https://openweathermap.org/stations

Thanks!



3 Comments

Reply to this comment...


NREL's SAM has access to NREL AWS Truepower files, you may be able to access and incorporate some of that data if you're looking to measure wind energy potential. There is also similar information on solar potential if that's a direction you're thinking of going in.

I did a little bit of digging, this dataset looks pretty out of date, but I'm sure there's more available somewhere on NREL's site.

Reply to this comment...


@warren, what is "helpful", as you know, depends on the intended use. Data from unknown and unsubstantiated sources can be unreliable depending on your purpose. If what you want to do is "see" wind patterns I find the Wind Map at http://hint.fm/wind/ to be aesthetically and visually more than adequate.

Reply to this comment...


Log in to comment