Heating and Cooling Load Forecast

A tool that forecasts and visualizes the heating and cooling load across the continental United States.

Prerequisites

• gdal -- Geospatial Data Abstraction Library. Backs the rgdal R package, which is used to load and plot weather forecast data.
• R -- The R Project for Statistical Programming. Used to load weather forecast data, calculate heating and cooling degree days, and plot results. Additional R package dependencies are required for this project to run. These may be found in the DESCRIPTION file under the R package root.
• ffmpeg -- used to generate the MPEG animated forecast
• ImageMagick -- used to generate the HIF and MPEG animated forecasts
• rbundler -- used in the binary script, though not strictly required for any ad-hoc work

These dependencies should be available for any *NIX machine.

I used homebrew to install them on OS X.

Refreshing the Forecast Plots

Installs all R package dependencies and runs end-to-end forecasts:

./bin/generate_load_forecasts.Rscript