Weather heatmaps
March 18th, 2011
This post is an adaptation of Ted Ngai’s climatic visualization techniques with Matlab which can be seen here:
http://www.tedngai.net/experiments/climate-visualization-with-matlab.html
The only problem is that Ted’s scripts use Matlab, which is a commercial software and quite expensive. On the other hand, Microsoft Excel can be found on almost every machine!
I have adapted his script which uses Matlab to generate the heatmaps into Excel. Download the Excel file here:
It isn’t that hard to work out, but even then I will give a small tutorial:
- Click on the IMPORT .EPW button and select an EPW file. This will import the weather data into Excel automatically.
- View the worksheets Ta, RH, Bn, Dh for the automatically generated heatmaps.
Quite simple!
Here are some screenshots for the Riyadh EPW file:
Ta: Dry bulb temperature
RH: Relative humidity
Bn: Direct beam radiation
Dh: Diffused horizontal radiation
If you print these as a PDF, they can be used Illustrator or other vector-based imaging programs.
Tags: excel, heatmap, weather
This entry was posted
on Friday, March 18th, 2011 at 2:44 PM.
Category: Tools, Tutorials.
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7 Responses to this post.
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beautiful!!
Thanks Olga!
This might sound stupid, but:
When I have downloaded it, how to open in excel??
Did you download a file called Heatmap_v1.xlsm? If so, just double-click on it and it will open automatically in Excel. This has been created using Office 2007, so if you are using an earlier version, it might not open.
I've downloaded the file from the post (it is a .zip file?!). When opening the .zip, I find the folders: _rels, docProps, xl and a file called [Content_Types].xml, but no such file as Heatmap_v1.xlsm….. Probably I'm doing something wrong? I do have Office 2007.
Thank you!
I don't know what you are downloading! Are you clicking on the link which says "Heatmap_v1"? I tried it again using Chrome and Internet Explorer. It works fine. Maybe you have some download manager which is interfering with the way it's being downloaded.
Yes, I clicked the link. I've also tried on several different computers but still only lets me download a .zip-file. Can we connect on facebook, maybe you would like to sent it to me by mail?