Our First Map

We are happy to announce that we have our first Climate Visualization Map

http://innova-t.appspot.com/marovi/listPoints/

The Process
We have created a semi-automatic process.  We download the GRIB file to a local linux box. We then process that file so that we extract:

• initial timestamp
• latitude and longitude
• temperature in Kelvin

The excel that is generated is the input to the datastore in GAE.

Styles and Heatmap Layer
Maps are good if they display what we want clearly. That´s why we were inspired by several talks of the Google Maps Developer team to include some of their recommendations on the maps. Of course, we turned on the Heatmap layer -- which is a part of the Google Maps API. We configured the terrain, inverted the lightness to display water masses and countries more clearly. We also specified the opacity in a custom format. The data points were also important and we turned off the dissipation for a better effect of the temperature.

And of course, we used the Style Map Wizard for testing our styles.

Content
The map displays only 1000 data points from a set of 150K temperature measurements taken during the first four months of 2012. We plan to integrate more than 30 years worth of data. So this is a good start. We are able to validate that the coordinates are correct (displays temperature on top of land masses) and that they make sense. The points displayed show that in Australia is is warmer than America due probably to the hour of the day.