Interactive, Informative Maps of the Automated Meteorological Data Acquisition System (AMeDAS) Weather Stations in Japan

(A) Data Collection
(B) Data Preprocessing
(D) Data Visualization
weather data
Japan Meteorological Agency
data scraping
data parsing
library - requests
library - bs4
library - datetime
library - pytz
library - pandas
Author

Mai Tanaka

Abstract
Searching for the parameters needed to specify the URL of Japan’s weather stations can be time consuming. I have made an interactive, informative map that helps data scrapers to quickly locate the target weather station, figure out whether the desired meteorological data is collected, and effortlessly identify the information needed to designate the URL for data scraping.

Snapshot of the interactive and informative maps of all AMeDAS weather stations from the Japan Meteorological Agency. Click here to see the maps in action!

Snapshot of the interactive and informative maps of all AMeDAS weather stations from the Japan Meteorological Agency. Click here to see the maps in action!
Warning

This project is still ongoing. Documentation is incomplete.

So, What Am I Up To?

  • Scraping data from URL links to identify a JMA stations’s prec_no and block_no
  • Reading a file of unknown encoding
  • Converting Japanese ‘reki’ dates into Gregorian equivalents
  • Converting names of places from Japanese to romaji (using English alphabet)
  • Drawing stations on an interactive map using folium
    • Generating simple HTML for legends, mouse-over text, and pop-up text
  • Cleaning up my code to make it accessible and understandable by a wide audience
  • Translating my lab notes and code from my exploratory analysis into clean, concise documentation