14 Jan
2021
14 Jan
'21
2:23 p.m.
On Thu, 14 Jan 2021 09:31:27 +0100
deloptes <deloptes(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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.
The list of provinces/territories is correct, but
there are ~700 Canadian
weather stations on the list, and some of them are going to be difficult
to place. None of them use the "state" field, although some of them
annotate the "city" field with a province. Some may have to be tracked
down using the latitude and longitude given.
yeah ... now everybody understands why there were not enough stations to
select in the GUI and perhaps you understand why I'm asking here for help.
It is quite of effort to work all these out ... and the 700 are only in
Canada ... what about the rest of the world? 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).
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.
E. Liddell