As part of my PhD I wanted to use a simple model which would give me an estimation of the atmospheric ozone amount given a location and time of year. A simple model to do this was created by van Heuklon in 1979, and was described in a delightfully simple paper (unfortunately not freely available […]
This is a first of a number of posts based upon discussions I had while at the Collaborations Workshop 2013 (#CollabW13 on twitter) in Oxford, UK. During one of the sessions I described a simple technique that I try and use to increase the sustainability, reproducibility and releasability of code that I write, data I […]
Summary: A useful guide to automating ArcGIS using Python, which is fully up-to-date with the latest version of ArcGIS. Definitely provides "quick answers to common problems", but it may take more effort to get a deep understanding of the methods used. Good breadth of coverage – but notably lacks raster examples – and well explained […]
In honour of the bicentenary of John Snow’s birth – and because I was asked to by someone via email – I have now released my digitisation of John Snow’s Cholera data in a few other formats: KML and as Google Fusion Tables. To save you reading my previous blog posts on the subject, I’ll […]
Updated 6th Jan 2020: This post has been updated to fix the code example and the link to the Landsat shapefile download. As part of some work I was doing for my PhD, I needed to automatically find what Landsat scene path and row would contain a pixel with a certain latitude/longitude co-ordinate (this was […]
The New Year is a time of new beginnings – and so it is rather appropriate to launch the complete redesign of my Free GIS Data list today. As you can see from the screenshot above, it looks far nicer than before – but it is also far easier to navigate. The dropdown […]
So, I’ve been pondering an interesting scientific dilemma recently: how do you validate a validation technique? That is, if you’re using a certain procedure to validate some data (that is, check how correct/accurate it is), how can you validate the validation procedure itself? This has come up in my work recently in relation to validating […]
A while back I released a GIS dataset containing Snow’s Cholera analysis data in modern GIS formats, and georeferenced to the British National Grid (see my previous post). Unfortunately, there was an error in some of the attributes of the Cholera Deaths shapefile which caused issues when using the data. This error has now been […]
I’ve just signed the Science Code Manifesto because I firmly believe in what it says. Ok well, that probably doesn’t tell you much – generally I tend to believe in things that I sign – but I’d like to tell you why I signed it, and why I think it’s really important. A lot of […]
As you might know from some of my previous posts, I’m a big fan of making my scientific work reproducible. My main reasons for being so keen on this are: Reproducibility is key to science – if it can’t be reproduced then it can not be verified (that is, the experiment can’t be tried again to […]