FetchClimate

Inspiration | Features | Try online | Download | Case studies | People | Acknowledgements

Retrieve climatic and environmental information with the click of a button or a few lines of code

FetchClimate is a fast, free, intelligent climate information service that operates over the cloud to return exactly the information you need. FetchClimate can be accessed either through a simple web interface, or via a few lines of code inside any .NET program. FetchClimate is intended to make it easy for you to retrieve information for any geographical region, at any grid resolution: from global, through continental, to a few kilometres, and for any range of years (1900 – 2010), days within the year, and / or hours within the day. FetchClimate can also report the uncertainty associated with the values it returns and list data sources used to fulfil the request. When multiple sources could potentially provide information on the same environmental variable, FetchClimate automatically selects the most appropriate data source. Finally, the entire query you ran can be shared as a single URL, enabling others to retrieve the identical information.

Inspiration

Many environmental science research and applications require information about climate and other aspects of the environment. The good news is that a huge amount of climate data is available, covering the whole of the Earth surface. The bad news is that even the experts find it very difficult to find the data they need, and to extract the information they need from that data: locate potential data sets, negotiate permissions, download huge files, make sense of the file formats, get to grips with yet another library, filter, interpolate, regrid, etc. These hurdles can significantly slow, or even prevent, the eventual utilisation of the data.

Features

• Air temperature, precipitation, soil moisture and more.
• Spatial grids or time series; yearly, seasonal or for just a part of a day.
• Intelligently selects proper data source for each request; but can be forced to use a particular data set, too.
• Interactively compose a request; or import request parameters from a file.
• Present the result graphically or export it to a file.
• Use dynamic web interface, call it from a command line or from your program.

Try online

The FetchClimate web interface doesn’t need a download: just click here (requires Silverlight).

Download

To get data from command prompt or directly to your program download the FetchClimate Client utility and library.

Case studies

• Matthew Smith and Drew Purves at Microsoft Research combined FetchClimate and Filzbach to create a new model of the global carbon cycle

People

FetchClimate was conceived by Drew Purves and Vassily Lyutsarev (Microsoft Research Cambridge) and built by Vassily Lyutsarev in collaboration with Moscow State University (Sergey Berezin, Dmitry Grechka, Dmitry Gryzunov).

Acknowlegments

This projects was supported by Microsoft Research Connections.

Please send us your feedback to <fetchclimate at microsoft dot com>.