Animation of the wind that we had on Elinca

There’s now a reanalysis called ERA5 of the global weather from 1979 to the present day (https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/reanalysis-datasets/era5). It seemed like a fun lockdown project to use this to visualise the weather that we had on Elinca in 2013 and 2014 during the trip to Antarctica and South Georgia. You can see these animations at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0SYrhHhv9r51B4SSs45Nq8v0WIwh2rEs

The position data comes from Elinca’s YB tracker that sent a position every eight hours and so I’ve linearly interpolated Elinca’s position between these fixes, which generally works ok unless we were passing around lots of headlands (see the delivery from Falmouth to Stornoway for an example of this going wrong!) Actual positions are shown with a green dot and interpolated positions use an orange dot.

The ERA5 data is courtesy of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. The animation library is by Creati at al. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2019.02.008). My code is available at https://github.com/jonseddon/elinca/ in case it’s any use to anyone.

There’s loads more that could be done to improve the animations but I should probably leave it there and finally paint the bedroom doors.

Jon

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0SYrhHhv9r51B4SSs45Nq8v0WIwh2rEs