Ive always been drawn to weather charts. From about the age of 10 i used to flick through copies of The Times (who had the best 5 day pressure charts) on my way home from school looking for that 976 low in The Atlantic and high pressure over the UK bringing us solid swell and light SE winds!
Now of course Magicseaweed run very clever models for free but this didnt stop me wanting to know how these were built. So i set about creating my own swell model from scratch. I didnt know where to start but eventually through searching forums of some seriously complex programming talk i found that Python and the scientific plotting module Matplotlib and mapping module Basemap were the best contenders to produce these charts.
The toughest task was installing Pygrib the Python interface for reading and writing GRIB data from the NOAA. I cant begin to tell you how complex this was for someone with no experience in this. I eventually had to dedicate a linux computer to solely run this script. Im sure there are probably easier ways but i never found one…
Eventually i was plotting the charts through custom parameters including different dates (any date back to 1979), colours, and areas of the globe. As i said i always found these charts very aesthetic so i went on to produce some prints from the data of memorable swells and had them framed.
If you would like to buy one of these prints for £39.50 including frame please contact me with dates/area of the chart you would want and ill get one out to you.
