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:bug: Legacy dragonfly plugin for large-scale climate and urban heat island modeling.
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How to Improve the Current Climate Change Weather Gen (CCWeatherGen) Tool #2

Closed chriswmackey closed 6 years ago

chriswmackey commented 8 years ago

I am starting this issue specifically because @antonszilasi us beginning work on a python version of the current Excel-based 'Climate Change Weather Gen' (CCWeatherGen) Tool. This is tool that almost everyone uses to warp EPW files to future climate change scenarios projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

This issue is where anyone should feel free to post ways in which they think the current excel-based tool could be improved by a translation to a python Grasshopper component. @antonszilasi will take into account all comments in his development of the component. I will start by listing a few improvements that I see happening with this python version:

1) Any new user of the CCWeatherGen tool needs to download the entire HADCM3 database file-by-file (there are 76 files in total) and copy them into the CCWeatherGen folder on their machine. Any new user also needs to change the file names of three of these downloaded files. All of this results in an installation time of almost 20 minutes.

2) It takes a long time to run the CCWeatherGen tool (around 20 minutes per weather file) and this at least partly because of inefficiencies of Excel as compared to an full computer language

3) There seem to be some bugs in the CCWeatherGen tool as evidenced by this GH discussion here: http://www.grasshopper3d.com/group/ladybug/forum/topics/impossible-to-visualize-weather-data-from-epw-ipcc-scenario-a2?commentId=2985220%3AComment%3A1183831&groupId=2985220%3AGroup%3A658987

4) The current CCWeatherGen tool does not work with the current 2013 version of Excel, forcing users who are using the latest version to revert to old software.

I have already aimed at mitigating the first item that I have put on this list by uploading the entire HADCM3 database to the 'resources' folder of this repository. @antonszilasi , when you begin to develop your component, I imagine that the automated downloading and unzipping of this database from the github will be one of your first goals.

I am looking forward to this future component really rocking my workflow and for generally raising awareness about the impact of climate change on the design of the built environment.

chriswmackey commented 8 years ago

Also, I just wanted to make sure that I posted the link at which you can currently download and install the CCWeatherGen tool:

http://www.energy.soton.ac.uk/ccworldweathergen/

chriswmackey commented 6 years ago

Given that I have come to realize that there are a number of issues with the CCWeatherGen tool, I am instead going to press forward by trying to connect to @paragrastogi's Synthetic Weather , which is currently in the process of being translated to Python. So I am closing out this issue and there will be some new issues coming soon regarding the connection to Synthetic Weather.