What is climate?

It’s a library to facilitate reading the climate change data used by the IPCC in your (ruby) application, mashup etc. The idea came from the Guardian’s Damian Garrington’s talk at mashed08 : “Can the world wide web save the big wide world?”. The ultimate goal is to create a georeferenced climate change API. That would be cool. It would be great to be able to easily use public domain climate change data in a mashup right? Get in touch if you want to work together!

First, read climate change 101

I used to do climate change based research in a past life, and was interested in doing some sort of mashup visualisaion using climate change statistics. “Buying a property abroad? Don’t buy here! etc). It’s a topical field, and I thought things must have got easier than they were back then. Athough I was hoping for an API but found that things were still in web1, there are now data standards, and accessibility to the data has improved a great deal. so it’s not all bad.

Where is the data? Is there a climate change API?

As mentioned, there is no easy API out there, and all the data is stored at data clearing houses:

1. IPCC data distribution centre (for general easy to access mean datasets)
2. WCRP (all the IPCC datasets daily and monthly, but you need to apply for a username).

There is some sort of easy access via something called the Live Access Server, but is ever there was an application hell, this is it. You can get to data in the end via this interface, but it’s in a proprietary format, so as far as I can see it’s designed for humans only, and has no visible API.

Ok, so how do I access it?

Well, the good news is that the files are now all kept in a standard format called NetCDF which uses .nc files. You’ll need to download one from the IPCC data distribution centre to get started, and then move on to prerequisites for running the helper script.

• Installation of prequisites
• Making sense of the data / using the library