E. Liddell wrote:
What can I say? Canada is the second-largest country in the world. We have vast tracts of thinly populated land (and vast tracts of largely unpopulated land too), and weather stations are sprinkled all across that.
In a lot of cases, though, a breakdown by country is going to be sufficient. A small African nation might have 20 stations or so, which isn't too much for one list.
Yeah it looks like we need a TDE KWeather committee to rule out the division of the world :D
There are 6702 in the file from which 2590 are already done because they are are in the US. A big portion of the rest is just countries (like Europe etc) Africa, Russia, Mexico are good candidates.
I could easily map everything from Canada to one country Canada, but it will be difficult to find the right station. What do you think
For the Canadian stations specifically, it should be possible to allocate a lot of them to provinces based on the annotations at the end of the "city" field, which are mostly the old conventional provincial abbreviations that everyone except the post office actually uses:
N. S. = Nova Scotia N. B. = New Brunswick PEI = Prince Edward Island Nfld = Newfoundland Que. = Quebec Ont. = Ontario Man. = Manitoba Sask. = Saskatchewan Alta. = Alberta B. C. = British Columbia N. W. T. = North-West Territories Y. T. = Yukon Territory
There's some variation in capitalization and punctuation, and locations in Nunavut are likely to marked as being in the NWT for historical reasons, but it's a start and should be able to assign most stations in the more populated areas to a province using a few regular expressions for matching.
Some of them can also be assigned automatically based on latitude/longitude ranges (north of a certain latitude mostly places things in the Territories, south of it in the provinces, and Québec and provinces westward *almost* adhere to specific longitudes, although there are some ambiguous zones—I'll see if I can get some numbers tonight).
we are not writing a PhD here - we want v1.0 v2.0 etc. so lets start simple. I just don't feel like doing this myself. If you know where the name belongs to it would be much easier - to me the names do not say anything (not Canadian)
The rest of them can be dropped in a bin labelled "Canada - Unknown" or the like and assigned whenever someone figures out where they are. (If we can find a way of making these assignments easy for a non-technical person to do, it might be helpful.)
This is mainly a concern for really large countries (Canada, U.S., Russia), where if you pick the wrong weather station by mistake, you could be getting forecasts for the other side of the continent.
Yes, I was going to suggest for version 1 to map the stations to something like unknown. For example Mexico is done like this Mexico -> Mexico. This will become Mexico -> Unknown
I could of course preserve the already used associations.
thank you and regards