I have been working on a dashboard for supporting the production of regional climate monitoring reports for WMO. The aim is to gather in one place, datasets for key global climate indicators, as well as providing regional temperature indicators. The dashboard provides some traceability between the original data sources (as they enter the system) and what appears on the dashboard. It’s updated at least twice a year, but not every single month as its aim is to support annual monitoring.
The dashboard itself is a set of simple html pages generated automatically from a set of simple climate data.
The code that generates the dashboard and plots is on github. It handles:
- Downloading and (to an extent) managing time series and gridded data.
- Managing metadata of the datasets.
- Processing of the gridded data into timeseries.
- Definition and production of the dashboards themselves, which includes…
- Templates for different dashboard types.
- Producing standardised figures.
- Producing paragraphs of text containing standard information.
- Self documenting the processing and storing this in the data files and dashboards.
If you want to raise issues – things you’d like to see, things you don’t want to see, weirdness, wrongness etc – go ahead1. I can’t promise to act on them2, but I will take them into consideration.
Documentation for the code contains a user guide. There’s also a talk-through YouTube video, which introduces you to the major features:
The same system can be modified to produce more frequent updates of key figures and adapted for other sets of indicators and different “looks”. Unfortunately, it’s not a fully portable package of code. Some of the inputs you’ll need – i.e. some of the data sets and files – aren’t publicly available and because of various restrictions I can’t bundle them with the code. They would get out of date anyway.
The range of indicators will expand over time. Next on the list are precipitation maps (done), regional sea level time series and a set of typical climate indices e.g. NAO, AO (done) and the rest of the alphabet soup. Next on the next list are:
- Global carbon budget
- Wider range of greenhouse gases
- Sea level budgets
- Extremes
- Earth energy budget
-fin-
Diagram Monkey 