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Ways to manipulate the wind and weather data that Wolfram Alpha offers?

T Stroomer
Posted 10 years ago

I am a new user. I am interested in using Wolfram Alpha to manipulate weather data, in particular historical wind speeds and forecasts for certain locations on the Great Plains.

I have been able to pull basic wind data and forecasts, for example using the following query: wind speed dec. 15, 2014 "city clayton, nm" vs "city guymon, ok"

I have two questions.

  1. Is it possible for me to search for locations, within a region, where the wind is forecast to be the strongest? Something like: highest wind speed in new mexico on dec. 15,2014 . My searches like this aren't returning the data I need.

  2. Where can I learn more about the weather data that Wolfram Alpha is working with? So that I have a better sense of the parameters I can manipulate and use to search.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Best, Theo
POSTED BY: T Stroomer
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Theo Brayord
Theo Brayord
Posted 10 years ago

Wow, that is a beautiful website :P I'll have a good look at it later, if I find a way to pull in the data with an ETL package it may be a more elegant solution. Many thanks.
POSTED BY: Theo Brayord
T Stroomer
T Stroomer
Posted 10 years ago

I didn't find any more information on making better use of the search engine here.

What I did track down was a site for forecasting and visualizing wind data. Current data and weeklong forecasts work beautifully; it can pull historical data and show you a visualization but I find this feature is still buggy, or at least hangs when you go digging into the past.

The creator, surely, could tell you a lot about how he manipulates publicly-available data. The site is windyty.com . There is an active Facebook page you can use to get in touch.
POSTED BY: T Stroomer
Theo Brayord
Theo Brayord
Posted 10 years ago

Hi Theo. Quite the coincidence; I'm also a new user, working with weather forecast data, and my name is also Theo.

I had trouble searching across regions as well (specifically I wanted to average over regions) so I moved to Mathematica. If no one can suggest a better alternative, I'd say pull data from all of the weather stations you want to asses, export it into a database, and perform analysis from there. That way you'd also keep the data to run any other tests you come up with later.

The only trouble I'm having with this method is that forecast data doesn't seem to be available to Mathematica directly. So I've been using the Wolfram Alpha command to access the data.

For this method you could try;

WolframAlpha["windspeed forecast KCQC", \
{{"WindSpeedChart:WeatherData", 1}, "TimeSeriesData"}]

Replacing "KCQC" with the name of every weather station in the area you'd like to asses. If anyone knows how to access weather forecast data directly, please share.

Hope this helps. If you already found a way to solve the problem, I'd be interested to hear it.
POSTED BY: Theo Brayord
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