The weather in London this summer seems to have been spectacular in its mediocrity. After an exciting looking start with a really warm May, it turned cold and damp and seems to have stayed that way.
I felt cheated.
But! How bad was this summer in comparison to history? I couldn’t find out anything on the internets to tell me, but I did find tutiempo.net which seemed to have loads of historical weather data. So I cracked out Beautiful Soup and made me a scraper: climatescraper.py
The way I have it set up, it downloads all the weather data for London Heathrow from 1949 to now (excluding the years around the 60s as they all seem to be missing). It then saves the data to a little “database” (alright, it’s just a pickled python dictionary, but that’s because pickling is so easy!)
Now I have all this data, I can render it. For instance, here’s the average daily temperature for each day (this image brought to you by render.py):
As you can see, we haven’t been stiffed. The weather in London is just stunningly mediocre.
If you want to try this for another location, download these scripts and customise the sections at the top for your chosen location. You’ll probably want to tweak which years it downloads as well or you’ll end up with lots of unknown data… You’ll need Beautiful Soup for the scraper and the Python Imaging Library to render the images.