I love QGIS. Great community, lots of capabilities, and it is accessible without paying out of your eyeballs and isn’t reserved only for the gainfully employed hosted by enterprise licenses. I don’t mind what tool you use — remember it is the physician that renders the diagnosis not the stethoscope.
My beat is sustainability. I like that I landed on this perspective because it is applicable across everything of grave importance on our tiny little planet. Working in medical education, health, policy, and data science left a nontrivial amount of breadcrumbs leading me here.
I have a special fondness for Brazil because of its unparalleled beauty, rich biodiversity, and being host of arguably the most important ecosystem in the world.
There are many resources for climate files but until now I had only worked with netCDF files. QGIS makes it fairly straightforward to work with GRIB files and this is how I generated the wind flow map shown in the video. Eventually I will create a video but this post is useful for pointing out some of the details you will need.
First things first, where is the data. Copernicus has a Climate Data Store with free registration.
There are options you need to complete prior to downloading the data. Researching the event of interest will allow you to edit down the dataset appropriately.
I use Nominatim when I need box coordinates or a shape file for outlines of an area.
If it is your first time working with Mesh files in QGIS you may not have noticed the upload option in Data Source Manager — BaZing.
It will load directly onto the canvas and you can create color ramps to your liking. Layer Styling will allow you to manipulate the raster images (multicolored square next to hammer | tool icon) and add the vectors (select arrow) to the canvas. You need to make sure that the icons are visible next to the 10 meter wind group.
Best way to learn how to create these gifs is to play around with the settings.
You will want to customize your project and QGIS does a nice job explaining how to use the expression builder and view » decorations to add both a scale and a title to your canvas.
View allows you to add your Scale Bar…
Now you can export to software like GIMP — free and open source to generate the gif. Be sure to save the Temporal Controller for the animation range you are interested in highlighting in the gif.
Upload into GIMP and you can optimize for animation and export to a file for uploading to your destination. You can also crop your image within GIMP if needed.
Final adjustments allow you to refine the display.
Go see what you can create!