Monthly hours of sunshine maps for Germany

The blog has moved to syngron.com

Monthly sunshine hours in Germany with individual scale.

Monthly sunshine hours in Germany with global scale.

Recently I saw this surprising map comparing the sunshine hours of Europe with the US:

http://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/161j95/europe_vs_the_united_states_sunlight_in_hours_per/

Any location in the US apparently has much more sunshine than any location in Germany! Actually this makes sense if you check the latitude boundaries of the US and Europe but it was never that clear to me.

This made me wonder how the distribution is in Germany and there are already a couple of maps done for that which are easily found with a fast internet search.

But then I stumbled upon some nice datasets from the German Weather Service (DWD, Deutscher Wetterdienst). They actually provide monthly raw data of sunshine hours for all of their weather stations online :

Free weather data from the DWD (mean data of 30 year period)

I used the Table A, Sunshine hours (Sonnenscheindauer), years 1981-2010.

The data from there can be easily converted into a CSV file by copying it in a spreadsheet software (e.g. Libreoffice) and save it as CSV.

To further process the data I used python which makes it straight forward to read CSV files and plot map data with the Basemap library. To create an evenly distributed grid of data from the not evenly distributed measurement points I use the matplotlib.mlab.griddata function and to plot the data on that grid the contourf function. The code provided in this gist (attention, in the gist the latitude and longitude are switched!) helped a lot.

My final script can be found here: https://raw.github.com/syngron/misc/master/DWD_sunshine_hours_Germany.py

The output of the script is shown in the pictures.

The first one uses a global scale which makes it nice to see the obvious changes over the seasons of whole Germany.

The second one is even more interesting, here each month has ist own scale and you can clearly see the regional differences per month. An interesting point is, that in the summer months the sunlight seems to be much more evenly distributed apart from the hole in the mid-west. In the winter month the most southern parts (the region is actually the Allgäu) seems to get much more sunshine then the whole rest. Probably this is related to the high altitudes there, the Allgäu stations are just over the clouds :)

New Google Calendar wall like column year view

The blog has moved to syngron.com

I am a happy Google Calendar user, however I was always annoyed by two things. One of those things was the missing year view which I fixed now by programming a new Google Calendar Gadget which you can find on my Github page. It creates a year view with each month in one row and all the events from your selected calendars:
https://raw.github.com/syngron/misc/master/SyngronYearView.html

Column year view with events in red (German public holidays)

To add the Gadget to your calendar just follow the link below while you are logged in to your Google account:
https://www.google.com/calendar/render?gadgeturl=https://raw.github.com/syngron/misc/master/SyngronYearView.html

The other annoying thing is not being able to smoothly scroll between months in the Google Calendar. At the end of the month I am not interested in the last four weeks before but more in the coming 4 weeks but in the online view there is only the static monthly view available at the moment. That annoyance I could not fix yet.

When I searched for a year view I found out that it was available through Google Labs as a gadget. Unfortunately I was very disappointed by it. I was expecting a typical wall calendar like we have it in German offices many times. These calendars have just 12 columns where each columns is one month. Each day of the months has a little field to the right to fill in simple informations or write the important office or holiday days. The Google Labs year view on the other hand is composed of a grid with four columns and three rows and each grid cell has the information of one month with no space for information of events. The next problem was that not even the days with events were marked specially. I know already how a year calendar looks, what I do never remember is where on that calendar I have appointments!

After googling a while I did find at least a version of this year view calendar with days with events being marked in a different color. However the event marking did not work properly when I last checked (found on the webbricks blog).

In the end I did not find any solution which resembled my view of a year view. After studying both codes, the one of the original Google Labs calendar gadget and the one from webbricks I thought however that I could try to build my own Gadget with my very rusty Javascript, HTML and CSS skills and the two templates. You can see the not quite perfect result in the picture above.

The Gadget works quite good and shows each month in one columns with all the events of the selected calendars in a separate row of the day just as I wanted it. But I was still not able to fix the height of the calendar table columns to an equal size. So months with more days or more events will be longer than others. Another issue is that if the screen is too small, months are cut off at the bottom (decreasing the font size with e.g. CTRL+MINUS can fix that). Another problem that came up with my real events was, that all events from the first five months were shown, but sometimes not all of the later months. I poll the calendar API monthwise and correctly check for events which last over the time of two different months, maybe the API does not allow too many polls in a row. I also found out that one single poll for the whole year does not work. I experimented with window lengths of days and weeks for polling but they were slower than the month wise polling and resulted in the same missing events sometimes. If somebody knows why that happens please tell me.

To sum it up I can say that the Google Calendar Gadgets are a great option and they can be programmed quite easily if you know web design a bit. The only problem is the annoying debugging procedure which involves reinstalling the Gadget after each code change so that the Google cache is not loading the cached version again. The cache is caching Gadgets for one hour and for me also the option ?nocache did not help. So it is best to pre-test Gadgets on your own server before trying them with the Google Calendar API.