Dashboard Stories

Observing Antarctic research station weather conditions

This dashboard shows the current conditions at various research stations in the Antarctic – information of particular interest to Popsy the Penguin, our SquaredUp Engineering team mascot!

Fiona White

Senior Test Engineer, SquaredUp

Dashboard preview

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Challenge

There’s a lot of weather data available for various locations in the Antarctic but it’s scattered across multiple websites. And there’s no easy way to see the weather conditions for key research stations in one place.

Although I don’t have any plans to travel to the Antarctic just yet, from a climate and ecological perspective it’s such an important region of the world, and I find some of the data fascinating. The temperature at some of the research stations is closer to the world’s highest ever recorded temperature than the lowest!

Plus, our Engineering Team mascot, Popsy the Penguin, hails from this area of the world so I wanted to create a fun dashboard that’s related to that.

Solution

I created a SquaredUp dashboard showing important weather data for each of the four key research stations in the Antarctic using data from OpenWeatherMap and the British Antarctic Survey. Plus, there’s information on the areas of research that the stations cover, plus the human capacity of each station.

I particularly like the ability of specifying a precise longitude and latitude for each research station and using this to bring the weather data alongside more specialized data from the research station observation sensors. It gives an overview of the conditions without needing to jump between multiple websites.

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Dashboard walk-through

Here’s a quick run-through of the various tiles I created and why they’re useful.

I created four text and image tiles along the top to label each research station and add a fun image of Popsy (Photoshopped) at each one to add context. These are the headers for the four columns of tiles that show weather data for each research station.

For each station there’s the current temperature, humidity, and wind speed displayed to give an overview of the conditions at each location. I used the OpenWeatherMap plugin, based on the longitude and latitude of each research station.

I also wanted to include specialized data from the Rothera Research Station sensors. Here, I’ve included the current visibility, sea level pressure, and wind direction sensor data. I’ve even enabled monitoring on the first two tiles so I get an alert when, for example, visibility drops below 5km. These tiles were created using the WebAPI plugin to pull data from the British Antarctic Survey meteorology API.

For the Station Map tile, I used a little bit of behind-the-scenes JSON trickery to bring the knowledge graph into the dashboard. This lets me visualize the research stations as objects on a graph. That allows me to drill down on each station to view its properties.

The final tile, a bar graph, shows the capacity of each research station grouped by their main area of research. It’s interesting to see the varied research areas in this region, especially the amount of research focusing on Biology. I created this graph using the built-in Properties data stream, and I used SQL Analytics to make the chart axis more readable.

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This Antarctic Observation Center dashboard is not available out of the box, but you can easily build something similar yourself with the WebAPI plugin.

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Simply create a free account to get started, or check out this video to see how easy it is to use our Dashboard Designer: