In early May 2025, we released new versions of both the R/exams package as well as the exams2forms extension. These updates include bug fixes, various refinements, and several new features.
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In November 2024, we released the new R package exams2forms, adding new features and building blocks for embedding (randomized) exercises written for the R package exams (aka. R/exams) as interactive elements in documents written with rmarkdown or quarto.
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Python package 'colorspace' with tools for manipulating and assessing colors and palettes is now available from PyPI, accompanied by a documentation web page and an arXiv paper.
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Need weather or climate data for Austria? The R package 'gsdata' provides easy access to the GeoSphere Austria API, allowing you to request and handle data from automated weather stations--and more.
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Will we have a white Christmas in Innsbruck in 2022? As of nine days before Christmas, the answer has become quite clear. A machine-learning model that combines atmospheric science, meteorological observations and statistical expertise gave the answer how high (or low) the probability of waking up in a white landscape on December 24, 2022, is.
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Over the past few months, if not even years, the R colorspace package has been extended and useful new features have been added. Alongside with the current release of the R software package a working paper has become available!
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Some might have used the Python GFS reforecast version 2 downloader I wrote some years ago. Today I made some smaller adjustments (fixed two smaller bugs) and made the code python3 ready. You should now also be able to download the reforecasts using python3.
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Quite recently the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) started publishing the new ERA-5 reanalysis data set. In cooperation with the European Union (Copernicus) this data set is freely available to everyone! And even better: a nice API grants easy access to this wonderful data set. This is a brief introduction on how to access ERA-5 data
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The R colorspace package exists since quite a while but was only available in R so far. This package (which is in an early beta state at the moment) provides the same features and methods as the R colorspace package in native python code. Give it a shot!
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The slides of the NOAA/PSD seminar talk are now available for download for those interested. The seminar talk gives/gave a short introduction to the standardized anomaly model output statistics approach and some insights of an application on high-resolution new snow amount forecasts in the Austrian Alps.
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This study shows the use and benefits of having a skewed response distribution rather than a symmetric one for ensemble post-processing of near surface temperature in Central Europe. A small adjustment which can strongly improve the predictive performance in alpine areas where the current ensemble forecast systems miss some of the wintery cold pools and overadiabatic heating of the valley atmosphere.
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There was an issue regarding the latest version of Pydap used to download the latest GFS/GENS weather forecasts via OpenDAP. I used this opportunity to fix some small things and to update the installation guidelines.
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New working paper by my college Lisa Schlosser is online now using distributional forests for probabilistic precipitation forecasts over complex terrain. The article introduces the novel statistical method and a real-world example for Tyrol, Austria.
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Just in time (before all the snow melts in front of the office) the new working paper/tech report became available. The paper is about a new hybrid approach to create high-resolution forecasts of fresh snow amounts and/or snowfall over Tyrol, Austria.
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The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) provides some nice data sets to the public. One data set is the ERA INTERIM reanalysis data set. In combination with the ECMWF python API it is quite easy to download these data. This post gives a short introduction and an example script how specify a specific subset and download the data.
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A new feature was just released on HCLwizard.org. The HCLconverter allows to upload an existing png/jpg/jpeg image and check for possible color-blindness issues. The uploaded image will be converted to different color-blind vision. Have a look before you publish!
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I as a meteorologist am often confronted with grib files, a binary file format for gridded data (e.g., weather forecasts). I've put my R package *getgrib* online if someone needs easy access to grib1/grib2 data. The package is far away from beeing finished, however, try it out :).
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For those grown up in a meteorological department in Innsbruck, Vienna, Zürich, Leipzig and Berlin the Wetterturnier should be well known. It is a platform where people challenge each other doing the best possible weather forecast for the upcoming weekend! As the existing system is getting old and buggy I've designed a new system over the last years (took quite a while!). However we are in the test phase right now!
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If you have a bunch of smaller jobs you have to go trough you might think of parallelization. While some software offers native parallel execution many do not. Python offers a very simple way to parallelize OpenMP jobs (no shared memory). An example.
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