Wind Dance is a tool for taking the wind measurements from weather data and using them to generated diagrams describing dance steps.

Given a day's worth of weather data, the program selects a representative reading for each hour and uses that to to determine the size and direction of the barb it plots. These barbs are spaced according to wind speed and direction as well.

Wind Dance accepts data in a comma-separated file, such as generated by Weather Underground (e.g., the bottom of http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KBED/2011/02/05/DailyHistory.html you'll find the link "Comma Delimited File").

Wind Dance is currently written in Ruby-Processing. I'm looking to convert it to a language and framework that can easily output vector-based images, quite possibly Flash.

Sample output

Requirements

Wand Dance requires Ruby-Processing to run. Instructions for downloading and installing Ruby-Processing can be found on their wiki.

Running Wind Dance

From the terminal while inside the Wind Dance directory, you'll generate an image by running a command in this format:

rp5 run dance_diagram.rp5 <image width> <image height> <date to plot> <path to the csv data file>

Image width and height are the dimensions of the tif file that will be produced. The date should be formatted like YYYY-MM-DD, and at least one measurement for each hour of this day should be found in the data file.

Here is a complete example:

rp5 run dance_diagram.rp5 8000 8000 2010-01-01 ~/data/weather_data.csv