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Weather Analysis Tools


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  • 1 month later...
On 12/21/2016 at 7:00 AM, sbarrett said:

Hello All! Here are the rest of the Weather Analysis Tools I have been working on. These have the same caveats as the Wind Rose - all of them access the internet every time the network is run. These are also a lot newer than the Wind Rose, so there may still be some kinks - I would call these beta versions. Please let me know if you have any issues!

WeatherAnalysis-Precipitation-161221.vwx

WeatherAnalysis-Psychrometrics-161221.vwx

WeatherAnalysis-SolarPath-161221.vwx

WeatherAnalysis-Temperature-161221.vwx

These are fantastic @sbarrettthank you very much. With the precipitation file, would it be hard to show total annual rainfall along with the monthly?

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
2 hours ago, J. Wallace said:

These are fantastic @sbarrettthank you very much. With the precipitation file, would it be hard to show total annual rainfall along with the monthly?

Not necessarily - it was something I was considering. The reason I chose monthly rainfall is that to get a good graph of annual rainfall you need to download a lot of years of data - all of these tools use the same data files, and the rainfall data is hourly. The current precipitation chart downloads the hourly data and averages it by month. If I did total annual rainfall I would make it a separate chart, because combining the two data types (average and total) would change the range and layout of the graph.

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18 hours ago, sbarrett said:

Hello @NikF

 

I just tried inputting "Vienna" into the Temperature Chart and it seems to work. The address locator is similar to Google maps - it takes a lot of different input formats.

 

The precipitation one doesn't seem to work with European Cities /Countries , all the others do? i.e., typing Rome in Temperature object works but not in precipitation....

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Ah - that is probably due to the data - the data for the charts all comes from the same site - I wanted to do that so the tools could work together, and once you download the data for one chart, it is available for all the other charts. For some reason, the data for precipitation was sometimes sparse for each weather station. I tried several different websites and chose the one I did because it had the easiest interface to download data and had the best data across the five tools. It sounds like I might have to use a different website for precipitation...

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4 hours ago, sbarrett said:

Ah - that is probably due to the data - the data for the charts all comes from the same site - I wanted to do that so the tools could work together, and once you download the data for one chart, it is available for all the other charts. For some reason, the data for precipitation was sometimes sparse for each weather station. I tried several different websites and chose the one I did because it had the easiest interface to download data and had the best data across the five tools. It sounds like I might have to use a different website for precipitation...

@sbarrettI noticed that the precipitation rates for Nanaimo, BC, Canada were off. Environment Canada has an excellent data based for many stations in Canada. It would be great if we could somehow pick which the station the data is coming from.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

That could be an interesting exercise - perhaps give a choice between different websites, and then be able to compare and contrast. This would be a hefty task though because I would have to create a different script for downloading the data from each website, but still organize the data so it would be universal to the rest of the marionette network.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
13 minutes ago, J. Wallace said:

@sbarrettI noticed that the precipitation rates for Nanaimo, BC, Canada were off. Environment Canada has an excellent data based for many stations in Canada. It would be great if we could somehow pick which the station the data is coming from.

There might be a way to make it more accurate - the network takes data from the THREE closest weather stations to the address you give. Some smaller weather stations don't have great data, so I figured the best way to mitigate that would be to average. There is a way to change this though - if you double-click on the Marionette object, you will see the script inside. Near the beginning of the network, there is an olive green node called "Get Nearby Stations." If you select that node, you will see there is a text box in the OIP that says "3." If you change that 3 to 1 it will only give you the closest station. I find the best weather data comes from airport weather stations, so give an address close to the airport to make sure that weather station is used.

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3 hours ago, sbarrett said:

 Near the beginning of the network, there is an olive green node called "Get Nearby Stations." If you select that node, you will see there is a text box in the OIP that says "3." If you change that 3 to 1 it will only give you the closest station. I find the best weather data comes from airport weather stations, so give an address close to the airport to make sure that weather station is used.

Great idea sbarrett. Thanks very much.

 

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Hi!

 

Thanks for the weather analysis tools, looks very promising indeed. However I tried to use all of the tools and just got the spinning ball, VW froze.

I am using a VW english version on a Mac set to Japanese language. Maybe is that setting that is causing the issues? or the access to the internet?

I can open the files but if I change anything on the OIP the whole thing just freezes.

Will try to find the issue. 

Cheers

JP

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

@jpoqthe first time you use the tool it can take up to a couple minutes to update - this is because it has several things it has to download first that it will never have to download again. There will likely be dialog boxes that pop up asking you to install a Python library, press OK when these pop up. If you internet connection is spotty, the definition can time out.

 

I would suggest that before you change anything on the object, that you right-click and select convert to wrapper node. Then you can change all of the parameters that you like and then run the definition after you have done this - I would recommend using an American address first time you run it (because it is an American website) and that you make the time period as small as possible. After you have made all of these changes, run the wrapper node.

 

I hope that helps!

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On 2017/1/27 at 11:32 PM, sbarrett said:

@jpoqthe first time you use the tool it can take up to a couple minutes to update - this is because it has several things it has to download first that it will never have to download again. There will likely be dialog boxes that pop up asking you to install a Python library, press OK when these pop up. If you internet connection is spotty, the definition can time out.

 

I would suggest that before you change anything on the object, that you right-click and select convert to wrapper node. Then you can change all of the parameters that you like and then run the definition after you have done this - I would recommend using an American address first time you run it (because it is an American website) and that you make the time period as small as possible. After you have made all of these changes, run the wrapper node.

 

I hope that helps!

Hi! Thanks a lot for the reply, will try your suggestions and report.

Juan

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
20 hours ago, digitalmechanics said:

also, if you look at the rain fall chart, the numbers overlap & 2 months on the wind rose sheet got an error message.

 

hi @digitalmechanics - The errors for the wind rose are timeout errors from accessing the internet - this can happen when the internet connection is a little slow, or if you try changing the Marionette object several times very quickly. Just try running it with those parameters again - it should work. If you get the error again, check your internet connection and try again.

 

As for the Precipitation chart, I see your problem - for a place like Phoenix this problem makes sense because it gets very little rainfall. I will have to make an edit to place the average value to the right or left of the bars of the graph.

Edited by sbarrett
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Hi,

Very nice scripts.  Would it be possible to display the identity of the exact weather stations and the database source that is used from those stations.  As an example when we do solar PV analysis we know the exact source and location of the data.  It would be convenient to be able confirm the coordination of the data used.  

Also, it appears that I can enter three letter airport codes for a result, or I can enter the city name and get a result.  What happens is that I get different results without knowing where the weather stations are actually located.  It also might be great for a little google map to pop up with the exact weather station locations that are used.  It appears the the location data is actually in the scripts as latitude and longitude, it would be great to display it.

I'm a novice at Marionette, otherwise I would try to do this myself.

Thx

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

That is definitely something that can be added to the script - I mentioned in an earlier post that the script takes data from the three closest weather stations to the location entered into the OIP. If I enter a city, like Baltimore, MD, the geocoded function in the script will extrapolate that city's "center," which may not be the geographic center of the city but a particular landmark. As there may be several weather stations in a city, the more specific you can make the address (as in 1234 Main St., Baltimore, MD) the more accurate the weather station choices will be. I will add printing out a list of weather stations to my version 2.0 list.

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