Climograph Software

National Geographic has a great lesson on climate types. My only issue with it is that it uses inches, and F. You can always have your students do the conversions, which is probably a good activity anyway. The defining characteristics of each climate type can be found here in pdf format. In order to make the chart easier to read, I made the program post the values

Though I will add more to this as the need presents itself, it's pretty functional as it is. All you need is to have Python on your computer, and graphics.py. It's a free download from www.python.org. This was made using 2.7. It may work on 3, but I didn't test it out. I plan to build a flashy interface, but it really isn't needed. Tweet me if you want the code.

Creating Climographs using Python

I'm just finishing a week long workshop on programming with Python at Carnegie Mellon University. I started knowing nothing, but found that I like the language. The week ends tomorrow with a presentation of something we developed using Python that applies to our profession. I teach a lot of Astronomy, but there is already so much out there. I didn't think I would be contributing much. But, I also teach the Earth Sciences, and was hard pressed to find anything out there in Python that was very useful. So I played around the graphing ability of Python, and discovered that I could use Python to create Climographs. So that became my project. I realize that it's not going to change the world, but it's simple to use. I went to http://www.worldclimate.com/ searched a few cities like- Pittsburgh Pa. Bangkok Thailand , OMG it's cold-Barrow Alaska, and my heart's in San Francisco. Here's what I made in just a few minutes

If you teach meteorology, climatology , environmental science, biomes etc, this is for you. It's easy to take a look at the Koppen Climate types and produce these easy to see graphs in less than a minute.

I will add a few more things to this, but you must admit, it's not bad as is. Now you, or your students can stop wasting class time coloring in graph paper ( though I realize that there is great value in teaching graphing skills)  Or, they can graph by hand, and you can show the solution ! win, win


Update: Non- fatal flaw that I need to fix. Some climates get more than 400mm of rainfall in a month. I will adjust the (win) later

UPDATE: 21 Jul- Made a version that gives a bit more data, and will do the wettest climates