[Qgis-developer] Re: MeteoIO

[Andreas Neumann]

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Hi Mathias,

The solar irradiance example and the interpolation algorithms sound like
interesting additions to QGIS.

I also like the idea as a possibility to make QGIS more attractive to
scientists (next to the more common GIS tasks like data acquisition, map
publishing, simple analysis). It would help QGIS to gain foothold in
certain scientific communities.

Note, that I am not a developer (just a user) and cannot judge the
technical consequences and maintenance issues that come with such a code
addition. It would be important that a community would evolve around
this library and related tools/algorithms for support and maintenance.

There are also related efforts around SAGA and GRASS that may have some
overlaps with the envisaged goals of your library/tools - but it may be
that your code would be faster/more optimized for certain tasks?

Andreas

PS: Mathias: we use QGIS along with Postgis, gdal/ogr and others in the
administration of the City of Uster. We use it in a mix with other
commercial products. See our case study at
http://www.qgis.org/en/community/qgis-case-studies/uster-switzerland.html -
the goal is to move and more and more projects to the OS GIS platform
over time as the tools evolve. We also help to test and finance certain
improvements/new features along with other public administrations.


On 06/27/2011 08:40 PM, Mathias Bavay wrote:
> 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!
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