[Qgis-developer] Re: MeteoIO

[Mathias Bavay]

Hi!

[sorry I missed the beginning of the discussion: I was not registered yet]

So, when I proposed you to talk about things from MeteoIO that could 
possibly be interesting for QGIS, I had the following in mind:
     *the calculation of solar irradiance on the ground, with terrain 
shadowing. Here, we are not talking about the (unfortunately) standard 
(pseudo)shading that is usually done in GIS (ie: adding shadows to 
highlight the terrain contours), but real shading. The radiation would 
only be valid for clear sky (we can not easily get the cloud 
information), but it would provide a valid potential solar irradiance 
information for a given date+time. We could easily also provide a 
yearly/montly/daily potential average solar irradiance layer.
     *we also offer a bunch of spatial interpolation algorithms (the 
kriging is not yet 100% finished, but almost). These are the tools that 
you need to transform point measurements in distributed values over a 
DEM (we use it for meteorological parameters, the whole thing was 
initially invented for mining)

Our library already provides meteorological data access, but is still 
focused on the research community (ie: labs exchanging data that is not 
necessarily publicly accessible).We are currently working on a proposal 
for the next 3 years, to provide more "end user" data sources and 
interconnect with general public data sources (like SRTM DEMs, weather 
services, etc). In such a context, we could then provide transparent 
access to lots of meteorological+DEM data. This could for example allow 
a user to simply define his base layer, select a meteorological 
parameter (like air temperature) and get spatially interpolated values 
on his DEM... I think that it would potentially be very nice. But we 
would need publicly accessible data first (which is slowly coming and I 
hope would be fully usable in 3 years).

Anyway, for now, I would propose the solar radiation code (that I would 
copy/past in place, not to depend on MeteoIO), that would bring a 
self-contained feature that I have never seen in GIS.

Mathias
PS: Hello Andy! I had no clue you were involved in qgis!