MetHack

System components
Application screen shot.

Inspiration

Have you ever been on a road trip and had to change your plans because of weather conditions? What if your GPS navigator could show the weather conditions in the upcoming locations and suggest alternative routes in case of bad weather.

What it does

Shows weather forecast along the route such as precipitation, wind speed and visibility. Suggests alternative safer routes in case of bad weather conditions.

How we built it

Compute routes using the Google directions api. Extract location and time information in high resolution along the route.
Retrieve corresponding weather variables with the Open Weather Map API. The weather forecast is based on NOAA GFS model and ENVIRON Canada models.

-Display the route on the map along with color coded route path depending on the weather conditions. The user can select what weather variables to consider. -Display a time series of weather variables. To provide a general overview of changes in weather variables.

Challenges we ran into

-Working with multiple data sources and APIs required us to use tools that we were not comfortable with. -Extracting the high resolution location data from google direction API was not trivial. -The web based visualization turned out to be more difficult and time consuming than anticipated.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

-Coding for 30+ hours in two days was a milestone. -We learned software languages and tools that we haven't worked with before. -Successfully used google direction API and the OpenWeatherMap to extract the data for this project and other potential future projects.