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Time series rasters

And the
Free and open source approach
Mike Spencer
@MikeRSpencer
scottishsnow.wordpress.com
m.spencer@ed.ac.uk
Outline
● What are raster time series data?
● What can you do with them?
● Why are they a challenge?
● The technical bit
● Where can you get them?
Definitions
Raster data

OS Terrain50 DTM
© Crown Copyright/database right 2014. An
Ordnance Survey/EDINA supplied service.
Time series data

http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/Weathercam/station/month.html
Combined!
What are they?

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk
What are they?
● Weather
– Radar rainfall
– Model outputs (temp/precip/etc)
● Satellites
– Atmosphere
– Land
– Cryosphere
– Ocean
● Repeat LiDAR
● Gridded model outputs

http://lca.usgs.gov/lca/africalulc/approach.php
Are they just pictures?
https://metofficenews.wordpress.com/tag/satellite-imagery/
What can you do?

http://nsidc.org/data/myd10a1 MODIS snowcover, 500 m, 1-3 Sept 2002


What can you do?

http://scottishsnow.wordpress.com/2014/09/14/british-hydrological-society-2014-symposium-poster/
Easy!
Why is this a challenge?
● Two tiles cover Scotland
● Two MODIS satellites pass every day
● 1460 tiles per year...

● Met Office radar rainfall


– 5 min interval
– 288 tiles a day!

http://catalystnz.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/24-hour-flashed-in-pan.html
Tools
● Programming language
● GDAL
● Data container(s)
● Plotting tool
Workflow
● Download dataset
– Think time and disc space
● File format and reprojection
● Read into container
● Analysis
● Write results to container
● Plot results
Workflow
● Download dataset
– Think time and disc space
● File format and reprojection
● Read into container
● Analysis
● Write results to container
● Plot results
GDAL
● File format (gdal_translate)
● Merging (gdal_merge.py)
● Reprojection (gdalwarp)
● Natively in Python
● Use in R via
– rgdal
– gdalUtils
Analysis
● r.mask – select only areas of interest
● r.mapcalc – general sums
– Also good for combining sources
● r.stats – summary of raster
● 161 installed modules (v6.4.5)
● Write results to SQLite
How?
Some data sources
● Met Office
– http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/ukcp09/download/index.html

● British Atmospheric Data Centre


– http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/home/index.html

● Edina (education only)


– http://edina.ac.uk/

● NASA
– http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/dataprod/index.php

● Centre for Ecology and Hydrology


– http://eidchub.ceh.ac.uk/metadata/5dc179dc-f692-49ba-9326-a6893a503f6e
Help!
● scottishsnow
– http://scottishsnow.wordpress.com/2014/08/24/many-rastered-beast/
● Volcan01010
– http://all-geo.org/volcan01010/
● Duncan Golicher
– http://duncanjg.wordpress.com/2012/12/11/loading-modis-ndvi-time-series-
into-postgis-raster/
● Stackexchange
– http://stackoverflow.com
– GIS/Overflow/etc
Many thanks @MikeRSpencer
& scottishsnow.wordpress.com
m.spencer@ed.ac.uk
Questions?

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