DTI Wind Speed data for the UK

[Tim Rideout]

Hi,

 

The UK DTI / Dept for Climate Change makes available a grided 1km square wind speed database. What you get are .asc files but they are not in a proper ascii grid format, so you can't open them.

 

They are sometimes called the DECC Wind Speed data or alternatively the DTI NOABL wind speed data.

 

Has anyone already got these either into a genuine ascii grid file or into a mapinfo tab 1km cell table?

 

Many thanks

 

Tim Rideout

[Greg]

Hi Tim,

You can open the .asc file in MapInfo, but it does need editing before MI recognises. I helped someone off MUGUKI open the data last year, but can't remember now exactly what was required. I'll have a look to see if I've got the old emails, or the data left and let you know.

Regards

Greg Driver.

[Greg]

Hi Tim,

I remember now, the data isn't in any particular format and you have
to edit it, even open it in ArcGIS. There's an information sheet that
accompanies the data, but I can't find it on the DECC website, so
Google it and the link will appear. Here are the instructions from
the PDF:

Importing into ArcView
Open your ASCII file in Excel as semi-colon delimited data, delete
header line and first column and then save as a CSV comma delimited
file. Open this in a text editor such as Wordpad and Replace the 'semi-
colon+space' with a 'comma' and then delete carriage return at the end
of the file and then add the new header lines at the top of the file:

ncols 700
nrows 1300
xllcorner 0
yllcorner 0
cellsize 1000

and then save it. Next, in the file manager just delete the ".csv"
suffix and replace with ".asc" and it is ready for Import into ArcView
if you turn on the "Spatial Analyst" extension.

Even then, I think there was an extra step involved to open the data
in MI, but can't remember what it is. Give the instructions above a
go and let me know how you get on.

Regards

Greg.

[Tony Pilkington]

This an adaptation of a LIDAR processing mbx. It only works for the UK data,
not the Northern Irish data.
The output MIG is very close to the DTI image.

The mbx is load and go; it asks for the path to the directory holding the
.asc data, loads your selection and creates a MIG.
The MIG has the same name as the input file but with a .mig extension. The
appropriate tab file is created and the MIG opened and displayed.
The first thing the mbx does is close all open tables.

Let me know if it is any use to you.

Tony

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[Tony Pilkington]

I should have added that the mbx Wind_Sock should be placed in the Mapinfo
folder, or griddll.dll,migrid.dll and mig.ghl should be copied to the folder
the mbx is in.

-----Original Message-----
From: Greg
Sent: Friday, April 19, 2013 5:25 PM
To: mapi...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [MI-L] DTI Wind Speed data for the UK

[Tim Rideout]

Dear Tony and Greg,

Thanks for your help. I will have a go at following your suggestions.

regards

Tim

Dr Tim Rideout
Director
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________________________________________
From: mapi...@googlegroups.com on behalf of Tony Pilkington
Sent: 21 April 2013 13:25
To: mapi...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [MI-L] DTI Wind Speed data for the UK

[Morgan C]

Hi Tony,

Thank you for your MapInfo tool, it has helped me to convert the three different wind speed height products into a usable form. I am sure Tim had similar success with your tool. Following the instructions with the data, I was able to convert to Arc grid format but could not get this usable in MapInfo.

Would you be prepared to share the method contained within the .mbx please? I struggle with "black box" solutions and am sure this would help me going forward. For example, did you manually define eight "inflection points" to style/categorise the display of the continuous wind speed values? I am finding my way around MapInfo as I've come from an ESRI background but I have access only to MapInfo and also QGIS at work.

Thank you kindly,
Morgan

[Tony Pilkington]

Morgan, I had totally forgotten about these. The NI data is best handled with the Irish Grid (old one, not the latest).

 

I took umbrage at the statement that the data was not searchable, and wrote a version which searches for 1km squares. Each square is also tagged with the 100k OS ID.

Speeds are held as smallints (shorts) multiplied by 10, rather than as float for data compactness.

Hence you can go in and locate all the areas with average wind speed between 7 and 8 m/s etc.

 

You get a short lesson in building and handling MIGs, which are a lot easier to handle than Vertical Mapper. Mind you, I have never had a chance to play with VM.

 

Good luck, and let me know how you get on.

 

Tony

 

 

 

From: Morgan C

Sent: Monday, November 18, 2013 5:18 PM

To: mapi...@googlegroups.com

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[Morgan C]

Tony, thank you for this - much more than expected!

I see your advanced MapBasic skills were used to write the tool I used and the other tools/MapBasic scripts. I'm afraid as I'm new to MapInfo, I'm also new to MapBasic (although have some experience in Basic in its various guises since the 1980s). I'll be referring to your code as I learn more about MapBasic. The latter processing parts of each script are more understandable to me, for example where you access the file system, read the data into variables/arrays and then process in loops and write out to the new file / format. I did note you declared eight inflection points. Thank you for this. I also compiled your 'square_rigger' script and successfully split the data into searchable MapInfo tab files. Really this is impressive!

I am finding a bit of a head shift with MapInfo for seemingly basic tasks. I am finding most of what I need done through custom written MapBasic Tools (written by others such as yourself). It is clear that my background using ESRI products as well as strong image/raster processing has produced some of my issues with MapInfo. Seemingly basic tasks like clipping rasters or even vectors appear to have no native functionality. Map layout is still difficult and counter-intuitive. I suspect MapInfo has come from a very different taskset focus which I will need to learn, until I can do most tasks in QGIS. Out of interest, I have subsequently used the useful MIG toolbox to crop the wind speed MI grids to country and county level (available here: http://www.hsgridder.com/downloads.html).

Thank you for writing the tool which has allowed me to turn the DTI/DECC wind dataset into a usable display format. Thank you also for your willingness to share your code and to educate others.

Kind regards, Morgan

[Tony Pilkington]

Morgan, Wind_Sock produces a MIG, which you can “fly” using the Map menu and Create 3D Map

 

 

Experiment...

 

MI & MB are positioned to be part of a suite of programs that can be used to process or manipulate data, as opposed to one big black box.

 

The difference between ESRI and MapInfo is that ESRI supplies you with a menus and tools for everything in a black box format; but nobody who can tell you how it was written.

Nor can it be easily adapted since Avenue was discontinued. Python does not seem that straightforward.

 

Any ‘ology’ or discipline where adaptations need to be done as the as the data sets or requirements change tends to use products like MI & MB since it is so easy and quick to cobble together something to deal with new data or a new requirement. Astronomers tend to use Fortran and Fortran libraries for the simple reason that there is a large and  powerful heritage of programs, that are well tested and trusted, and Fortran is very easy to write; they are a good source of source code as Fortran can be converted to MB very easily.

 

For image clipping, rotation etc look for paint.net.

 

Tony

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