Design "Climate Data" section

[philipmjohnson]

Goal and Overall Approach

The goal of this task is to explore ways to collect, display, and make climate data actionable for AGC members.

Remember the difference between climate and weather. There are a gazillion weather apps. The purpose of this app is to focus on climate.

Because @mercedezcastro will be using this as a way to develop her flutter skills, there is no recommended branch. Instead, she will likely create a new repository in this organization.

Here is one approach:

1. Interview Jenna and Jessie to get their perspectives on how they see climate impacting on their gardening practices. Notes from these meetings can be posted as a comment to this issue.
2. Review online resources regarding climate data and gardening. The sections below provide some starting points.
3. Create a mockup application in Flutter that ties this information together. This prototype app can be viewed as a standalone, "spike solution". We can later integrate this approach into the AGC app, but there's no need to make the code conform to existing AGC design ideas or constraints.

Potential App UI

One way to design the app is with a home screen that has a single field: "Enter your zip code". Once the user does that, the app presents a set of screens with climate-related information associated with that zip code. This can include:

• The hardiness zone(s), and the climate values associated with those zones.
• Trewartha zone(s), and the climate values associated with those zones.
• Monthly min/max/average for various environmental variables (with the current month displayed by default, with backward and forward arrows to go to the next/previous month
• Historical trends (i.e. month of June for past 30 years with respect to the various environmental variables).
• Finally (and most interestingly), any garden-related action items based on climate.

Note that this app is self-contained and could be released into the App Stores by Mercedez if she wanted to show evidence that she can build a Flutter app all the way through to production.

Resources and Ideas

Trewartha climate classification

Many gardeners rely on Hardiness Zones to identify the climate associated with their region, but this has well-known shortcomings (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardiness_zone), since it is defined only in terms of winter minimum temperature.

For example, Hardiness Zones do not include:

• Frost dates
• Frequency and/or reliability of snow cover (can provide insulation)
• Number of cold nights per year
• Summer temperature
• Insolation
• Day length (required for flowering)
• Vernalization (duration of low temperature)
• Humidity, Precipitation, Storms, Rainy-Dry cycles, soil type, soil drainage, water retention.

Investigate how we might improve the representation of the climate associated with a chapter. For example, Trewartha climate classification has been proposed as a better indicator.

Local weather stations

There are apparently 7 local weather stations in Bellingham. How can that data be accessed and integrated into garden planning?

Soil temperature

Soil temperature is considered a good way to determine when to plant. See Soil Temperature Data for Planting Home Gardens.

Climate Normals

Here's an article on how The new climate normals affect home gardens. Note that climate normals provide a set of potentially interesting measurements for home gardeners:

Home Garden Microclimate

The article How to record the weather in your garden provides some interesting tips on what to record and how to apply it.

The article How to determine your garden's microclimate also provides an interesting perspective.

Degree days

You can use degree day calculations to schedule planting and harvest, and explained in Vegetable Degree-day Models: An Introduction for Farmers and Gardeners.

Tracking climate change

Here's an inspirational article on how recording this data over time can be important.

[Jennacd]

@mercedezcastro see this issue related to your climate project

[philipmjohnson]

Jenna notes: As a start, it would be interesting to be able to:

• See what is happening locally at a month scale
• Compare months of one year to the same month of a different year
• Compare one year to another year, find similar years