Silly Idea - Ukraine Weather

OK done with some thoughts. Data entry went fairly smoothly. I have some confusion about the rainfall values and the wind direction.

Actual important stuff:
  1. I tweaked the formatting so that lines alternate between white and grey - same as the weather data tables. That made it much easier for me to track the lines as I entered the date.
  2. At first the wind direction looked that it was entered as where the arrow in the data table pointed. For example -> was entered as East. Later I was not so sure. Need to clarify that. I believe the game expresses wind as "wind from the <direction>" and that is what we should do in the table. So, the previous data - was it entered as the arrows pointed or as wind from? Do you agree that we should capture it as wind from? I may need to adjust my entries for today depending on your answers and if we are entering wind from directions we should change the title - the column title was the other reason I entered as I did.
  3. Rain fall ??? I entered the mm for the hour. For me those were all under 1mm mostly 0.1 or 0.2 but I see that none of the previous entries were done that way. I am not sure what those previous numbers were.
  4. Three columns for the date - I'll convert that to an actual date value and switch the time format to 24 clock that should make data entry easier.

Subjective stuff:
  1. We are defiantly going to have to have some kind of discussion about temperature ranges. I always figured Cold would have to include some below freezing temperatures and -10 is definitely not extreme cold :) Also 4 is not freezing either :) I also see that you have 29 as warm - yikes. We clearly have a different perspective :)
  2. I really like your work on ground conditions - very cool stuff.
This is going to be an excellent reference for people. Great idea.
 
A Canadian Cat said:
OK done with some thoughts. Data entry went fairly smoothly. I have some confusion about the rainfall values and the wind direction.

Actual important stuff:
  1. I tweaked the formatting so that lines alternate between white and grey - same as the weather data tables. That made it much easier for me to track the lines as I entered the date.
Click to expand...
Nice. I look at spreadsheets everyday so it's not something that crosses my mind.

A Canadian Cat said:
  1. At first the wind direction looked that it was entered as where the arrow in the data table pointed. For example -> was entered as East. Later I was not so sure. Need to clarify that. I believe the game expresses wind as "wind from the <direction>" and that is what we should do in the table. So, the previous data - was it entered as the arrows pointed or as wind from? Do you agree that we should capture it as wind from? I may need to adjust my entries for today depending on your answers and if we are entering wind from directions we should change the title - the column title was the other reason I entered as I did.
Click to expand...
Not something I thought about. I always just assumed the arrows were the direction of the wind and therefore if it's pointing to the south east it means the wind is coming from the north west which you enter into the spreadsheet. If we've got it back to front consistently or the game uses something weird in this respect I can simply write a formula that will reverse the directions. I just hope I haven't fallen asleep for one of the days and entered something incorrectly.

A Canadian Cat said:
  1. Rain fall ??? I entered the mm for the hour. For me those were all under 1mm mostly 0.1 or 0.2 but I see that none of the previous entries were done that way. I am not sure what those previous numbers were.
Click to expand...
I gave up quickly worrying about the 0.1's etc. I just round it up to 1mm and refer back to main forecast icon to see if there is notable preciperttion or not for that hour. (Raindrop from the cloud icon). Remember these values are only for that hour, not for the whole day that most rainfall guages measure. The game simply doesn't have that level of fidelity when it comes to working out weather conditions, and I'm not about to worry about every 1/10th of preciperation to work out if the ground is muddy or wet. :p


A Canadian Cat said:
  1. Three columns for the date - I'll convert that to an actual date value and switch the time format to 24 clock that should make data entry easier.
Click to expand...
Please don't. It's set up like that for a reason. I'll be able to combine all these regions into one sheet at the end of this and creat a pivot table (like some of my other CM excel works) to make it easer for the reader to use without going through 1000 of rows of data.
A Canadian Cat said:
Subjective stuff:
  1. We are defiantly going to have to have some kind of discussion about temperature ranges. I always figured Cold would have to include some below freezing temperatures and -10 is definitely not extreme cold :) Also 4 is not freezing either :) I also see that you have 29 as warm - yikes. We clearly have a different perspective :)
Click to expand...
Please do it's why I asked. :) My idea of extreme cold is anything under 5 degree's celsius and I agree that 29 degrees isn't exactly warm where I'm from. I couldn't find a table anywhere detailing how BF interprets these fields but my understanding is that they assume it's a fixed temperature. For example when you make a scenario 'Cool' it will always assumed to be 12 degrees celsius or equivilent. Unsure if time of day or month plays a role in this. If my theory is correct then it's a simply case of changing the the values assigned on the reference sheet (using the fixed BF/CMx2 values as a mid-point) and everything else updates automatically. Just get the numbers right. :)

I've been meaning to test this but just brain dead after work at the moment and CM has been far from mind. Will make a concerted effort ASAP.

A Canadian Cat said:
  1. I really like your work on ground conditions - very cool stuff.
This is going to be an excellent reference for people. Great idea.
Click to expand...

Still need to tweak and view all the combinations as time goes on to see if it's 'accurate' but getting this one right is probably the most important given vehicles and bogging risk. :p[/QUOTE]
 
Date columns:
Oh oh you are not going to be happy with me then. I can certainly put the date columns back. I have no experience with pivot tables but lots with databases so to me a real date value is much better than strings. Is a date really bad? I can put it back.

Sorry

Rain:
OK got it - seems reasonable.

Speaking of weather there does not seem to be much of a way to represent mist, various haze levels. I'm not sure what to do there - for now probably nothing, getting the data is more important.

Wind:
OK yes I think the page is showing the direction the wind is blowing and therefore we should flip that to what the game uses "wind from abc". I'll fix today's data.

Temperature Ranges:
LOL yeah perspective is everything. I'll come up with an alternative proposal and we can hash it around here and come to some kind of closure. Did you read the Cool = 12 deg somewhere or was that just an example? I cannot see anything written down.
 
Saturday the 17th of June added. Temperatures adjusted to reflect scale in game.

A bit of editor testing. The temperatures are fixed regardless of date (at least for the summer months depicted in the game), time of day and of other conditions such as rainfall/cloud cover etc. Appears BF expect scenario designers or their random generator script to pick something appropriate by default.

These are the fixed mid point values in Celsius. I've applied them into the reference sheet and them spread them both ways evenly.

Freezing = -7
Cold = 1
Cool = 12
Warm = 22
Hot = 29
Extreme Heat = 36
 
Another day added. I do this in my lunch break most days so well ahead of you in terms of timezones. Just shout out if you want to take over for a few days to get some practice in before I depart.
 
Problem. Hit personal troubles yesterday and the file wasn't updated. Got the backup website going but there are gaps.

Please don't think you need my permission to 'do a day.' Would also help if there were a few more volunteers, especially while I'm away.
 
Well that was fun - not. :) I found the date entry to be a slow and painful process so I spent several hours creating a program to read the data from the web sites and create a csv file that can then be used to copy and paste the data into the main spread sheet.

I just used it to update the data for today.

I figure on my eighth day I'll be in the black on hours spent :D If you look in the folder WebDataExtraction you can see the program and a readme.txt file. That should tell you how to use it.

There are a couple of caveats: only light rain, clear and over cast overall conditions have been see by the program and the web pages. It would pay to check that the overall text values are what you would expect, especially if fog, snow high winds snow up. If the program gets it wrong I'll need to fix it. The actual values should be good. However if the program hits a problem parsing a value it will put the string "err" into the cell so you can tell. If something really bad happens (like the web site is significantly changed for example) an exception will be seen on the command line. If any of that happens please let me know.
 
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