tas to date

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The name tas to date is a combination of the common variable name tas for near-surface air temperature and the concept of year-to-date relating to the period from the beginning of the year to a set point during the year.

Disclaimer. This is a pure fun side-project so please do not rely on the output for anything important and consider double-checking the code if you want to use it. The temperature information is taken from the ERA5 dataset which is probably not be the best available temperature information for Austria and the other regions, but it is convenient to use. Data less than about three months old are taken from ERA5T, the near real time version of ERA5, which might be still be updated for the final product.

Description. The collection of scripts in this repository mainly creates two kinds of plots:

• timeseries of daily temperature in a given region compared to the daily climatology in the same region
• timeseries of daily cumulative (year-to-date) mean temperature also compared to the climatology. Cumulative mean temperature is the temperature from January 1st until each day during a year. So for January 1st it is equivalent to daily temperature by definition and for December 31st it is equivalent to annual mean temperature.

Basic Usage. For pre-processed data (also termed "in-sample" data) covering the years 1950-2021 the main.py script should work out of the box if all required packages are installed. Just run

python main.py -h

for a list of possible parameters. The default year is the current year, so for the basic version this needs to be set to a non-default value. By default the script will currently create plots for all days of the year and all regions, which is quite a few files. Regions can manually be included using the -r flag repeatedly. Possible regions currently are: 'global', 'global-land', 'europe', 'europe-land', 'wce-land' (Western Central Europe), and 'austria'. For example try:

python main.py 2021 -r global

Plots will be saved in the figures directory.

Advanced Usage. The "operational" part of tas_to_date includes downloading near real time ERA5 data (out-of-sample data) using a separate routine (to be linked soon) and processing them on the fly. The tweet_*.py routines are then used to tweet specified plots on Twitter (you will need access to the Twitter API to use that).