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22 Mar 2013
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World Weather Planner
Welcome to my World Weather Planner, which shows weather by country by month. Its in excel, and the summary looks like this:
- Diagonal lines represent my upcoming route!
It takes into account:
- rainfall
- rainy days per month
- max temp
- min temp
- humidity
- heat index
Coverage area:
- Asia (partial)
- North America (partial)
- Central / South America (not yet)
- Africa
- SE Asia (partial)
- Australia
Looking for volunteers to help add cities, instructions are in the file.
You can see detailed data for each city on each of the above stats:
I assign a "discomfort level" to each data point, using 20C and no rain as the ideal weather. The further away from this ideal, the more discomfort there is. I assumed this as ideal "moto" weather, if you want to go skiing, this isn't the planner for you.
You can choose your own tolerance to rain, heat or cold, and the summary will adjust automatically. To do this, just change the percentages in the weighting box, as seen below:
Please let me know your comments.
Philip (aka NY-Lon)
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Last edited by NYLon2000; 26 Mar 2013 at 17:25.
Reason: Updated file
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22 Mar 2013
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Excellent work and thanks for sharing.
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22 Mar 2013
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NYLon2000
Its in excel, and the summary looks like this:
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I appreciate your effort, and I think it´s a great idea (personally I´m thinking something like this should be combined with some kind of map of the overland-routes, then it would really become helpful!)
But I also think, that it will still need some adjusting. There are areas, mostly deserts, where extreme summertime heat can become very dangerous. But what is probably more common worldwide in a 12-month period and especially further away from the Equator, are conditions that are cold enough to make most locals completely store their motorcycles away for the winter period (like average daytime temperatures near or below 0 Celsius – check out Irkutsk, for example, it´s in Siberia, and in I´m quite certain that discomfort level there for motorcycling cannot be the same for January and for July!)
So severely cold winters is something, that should be given much more weight on that calculation IMO. (Not that it will be a very important factor, when planning to ride through a warm continent, like Africa).
I don´t know, but maybe it would become more clear, if the different kinds of discomfort (heat, rain, cold) were marked with different colors, or symbols or something...?
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22 Mar 2013
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Great work, I did a similar document for planing my trip but this is much better.
I would agree with Pecha72 that cold needs a higher weighting. I have been to Irkutsk in January and I can tell you that it is not as comfy and London in July which both get a 1.
Maybe it should be Rain 40% Heat 30% Cold 30%
Would be great to see North India, Pakistan and Thailand
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22 Mar 2013
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Thanks for the feedback, I've uploaded an updated version. My aim has been to keep this flexible and extensible.
Kim - I added in a few regions (India, Pakistan, SE Asia, Australia) and will update the original file. The difficulty was that for some regions the source doesnt give "days of rain", so I extrapolated, from the rainfall.
Still need to add in the Americas and Europe etc.
Pecha72 - Icons might be beyond my Excel abilities 
The raw data is there if you scroll over. So, if you're more concerned with minimum temperatures, just scroll over to the right to see it - like this. Shows just how cold it gets in Siberia and the frozen north.
And, its built so the weightings can be changed. If you want to avoid cold, just push the weighting up, which I did here. You'll see that Mongolia/Russia etc in January is a no go. I am going through Africa in the Northern winter, so am most obsessed with rains.
Thanks
NY-Lon
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23 Mar 2013
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Excellent work.... must be winter up there 
Nit picking ...
Suggest you open it up to others to enter data for other countries? Say a sample excel file that they can use to enter data on a new worksheet... keep one contributor to one sheet?
One aspect overlooked - humidity. If that is high it is very uncomfortable to ride in. Can be physically dangerous. Don't think that has much effect in most of Europe. But at sometimes of the year it has significance in parts of Africa, Asia, central America... basically around the equator.
Another aspect is acclimatization. Basically you get used to the temperatures/humidity that you live in. Hard to put that in a universal table. But could help make the temperatures less critical.
=====================
Mapping will be nice and can be done ... I've long wanted to do that .. a gif/jpeg that has one month on it - then string the months together for a video.
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23 Mar 2013
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Just my personal opinion, and I might be wrong on this one. But for me, winter, snow&ice, as well as hard rains in the rainy season (in the tropics) are the real showstoppers on a motorcycle.
Winter, because it is just too damn cold to enjoy riding, and you'd need very special&expensive gear, plus lots of expertise to do it (relatively) safely. No way to camp either, unless you carry some polar expedition stuff! Tropical rains, because they can affect the roads, especially unpaved ones so much (in the mountain areas also paved roads get landslides, etc.)
Extreme heat and humidity should certainly not be underestimated, but they seldom affect the road network, or your machine's ability to go forward, they can affect you, and be dangerous to you, if you ignore the threat. But for one thing, extreme heat (say 45-55 Celsius) is not in the tropics so much, it's in the dry areas of around 25-40 latitude, and usually only happens in midsummer. Extreme humidity is more of a problem in the tropical regions. So it's not very often, that you have to deal with both extreme heat and humidity (that combination is of course very dangerous, and I don't mean to say each cannot be a danger on its own!)
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24 Mar 2013
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I spent some time over the last few days adding some cool stuff:
- Humidity. An obvious need.
- Heat index - uses a long formula to combine humidity and max temperature into a single measure of "how hot it feels"
- Added a data sheet for people to add data, which I will then add to the master file.
- Separated the data from the output. Now, just use the Output sheet, and use the drop down to select the cities in the order you want. All the data will populate.
- Better calculation of the Discomfort Level
> example of the Humidity and Heat Index:
> example of the drop down city select:
I'm slowly adding cities that are relevant to me. Would really be a help if someone helped by adding cities in other parts of the world: the Americas, Europe, SE Asia, Australia and the other holes.
I'm pretty happy with how it's coming together. Keep the feedback coming.
NY-Lon / Philip
PS. Updated file at the top of the thread.
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24 Mar 2013
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pecha72
for me, winter, snow&ice, as well as hard rains in the rainy season (in the tropics) are the real showstoppers on a motorcycle.
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It is not really the rain that is the problem. Hard rain usually last an hour of two, in the monsoon season that can be every day (usually around a certain time). It is the flooding that results from the rain that is the real problem for sealed roads and the closure or failure of the road surface for unsealed roads. However the climate data is for rain so...
--------------- Nice work NYLon2000. 
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24 Mar 2013
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Outstanding Work Philip
Should have spotted that I could change the weighting my self.
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26 Mar 2013
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Oz data
Slowly adding data for Australia... (to do Tasmania, SA, WA, Vic) not doing every thing available - just a representation.
some 'variations'
"Rain Days" in some places are listed as "Days with Thunderstorms"
? should they be some multiple of days with rain? don't know .. I'll leave them alone .. I'd think they have high humidity too
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there are things that are not on the climatic data that are a seasonal danger too ... any one know where to access that data and use it without copyright? E.G.
Dust storms in Africa?
Cyclone/Typhoon seasons ?
(climatic data is NOT available for most remote (uninhabited) locations .. so things like deserts are hard to 'map' that way - the best we can do is 'map' the towns around it)
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26 Mar 2013
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Oz data - a fair sample.
Ok first sample data for Australia. Covers most regions... may have missed some but it should give a good idea of what goes on?
Any format corrections?
----------------------- For posting here
Had to change the extension to .xlsx and reduce the file size to less than 100k .. did this by removing the worksheets I did not modify...
------------ following this mod
Suggest new data is cut from this file and pasted into the 'master' file?
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26 Mar 2013
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Now with Aus
Thanks Warin!
I've merged the Aussie data in, and posted an updated file.
You can see the Aus data here:
Please keep it coming, some more regions to be added. hint, hint...
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26 Mar 2013
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Hummm ... looking at that
I think possibly more non linear weighting may help... particularly for heat and humidity.
Low humidity has little ill effect so it is just a linear effect to say 80% then a more dramatic effect from there on ...
Rain also has little effect at low levels - just cleans the road a bit ... but not too bad... say up to 10mm in a day or two a month. What is a problem is 100mm in a day, can flood.
heats between say 10 to 30 are ok, after that they become increasingly uncomfortable... unless the humidity is very low (say <20%) .. one feeds into the other here ...
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29 Mar 2013
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mezo
This should be a function in Google maps, the ability to tick boxes for ideal condition, border info, places to buy fuel, things to avoid.
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I did some maps a while ago, not nearly as detailed as Google for example, but just to give some rough idea of overland-routes for a beginner. Here´s an example:
MOTO1
Been thinking to add some sort of relief shading to them to show the mountain areas, lowlands etc., and actually found a suitable map base to use for that, but haven´t got that far yet, really out of spare time for the moment!
But in case someone´s interested, I´m willing to let use these freely (to for example add the weather data to locations, you click a location and the data pops up, just an idea) long as it´s "just for fun" so there´s no money involved. I could provide the maps as PSD or JPG, but like I said, I currently don´t have much time to work on them. If I remember correctly theyre 1280px wide each.
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