FetchClimate

Established: October 27, 2011

FetchClimate is a fast, free, intelligent environmental information retrieval service that operates over the cloud to return only the environmental data you need. FetchClimate can be accessed either through a simple web interface or via a few lines of code inside any program.

Get environmental information in four easy steps

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FetchClimate provides ready access to complex geographical data.

 FetchClimate provides ready access to complex geographical information including, but not limited to, climatological information. On accessing the FetchClimate Azure web service, you simply need to perform four steps to find what you are looking for:

  1. Draw the location on the Earth via points or grids (Where?)
  2. Specify the data of interest (What?)
  3. Set the timeframe, including future predictions, and a combination of averages over—or steps through—years, days, and hours (When?)
  4. Fetch and view your results.

FetchClimate will choose the best data set for your query, and perform all the necessary regridding in space and time. It will return a best guess, uncertainty, and provenance for your query and display the results on the map for visual exploration. Alternatively, the FetchClimate service can be used directly via a simple API, from within programs written in any .NET language, Python, P or MatLab.

As of June 30th 2016, the FetchClimate project will be closing.

Try FetchClimate online now (opens in new tab) (the link forwards to a web site maintained by Moscow State University)

 

  • Features

    • Area selection: enables selection of single or multiple regions or points
    • Data:
      • Delivers air temperature, precipitation, and much more
      • Intelligently selects a data source for each request, or enables the user to select particular data sets
    • Time series: retrieves annual, seasonal, monthly, and daily data
    • Output: presents the results graphically or export it to CSV
    • Provides access through the web interface, a client application, or programmatically through a REST API

    To try online, download, or learn more, watch the latest tutorial video, or read the FetchClimate user guide (opens in new tab) (PDF, 2.24 MB).

    We are releasing FetchClimate in four different ways:

    1. A FetchClimate web service, running against a set of standard, useful climatological layers. Access that via the web explorer (opens in new tab), or use the API to this service from inside a program.
    2. A deployment package for you to create your own FetchClimate-powered service. All you need is a Microsoft Azure account and some data you would like to populate into the service and potentially share with the world. Download the deployment package (opens in new tab), which comes with the same web explorer that we used for the standard web service.
    3. The front-end web explorer will also be released open source, so you can rework and adapt it to work with you own FetchClimate-powered service. For example, you can rebrand the explorer to match your institution (all we ask is that you acknowledge that the service is powered by FetchClimate). This release is not ready just yet—please watch this space.
    4. A simple client app (opens in new tab) that lets you call the FetchClimate standalone from the command-line or link to your program in C, C#, or another Microsoft .NET language..

    Note: All four releases are early versions of FetchClimate. If you choose to use our service or set up your own, you can enjoy all the excitement—plus possible unanticipated behavior—that early adopters often encounter.

  • Details

    Retrieve climatic and environmental information with the click of a button or a few lines of code

    FetchClimate is a fast, free, intelligent, climate cloud-based information retrieval service. You can access FetchClimate through a simple web interface, or via a few lines of code in any .NET program. FetchClimate makes it easy for you to retrieve information for any geographical region, at any grid resolution—ranging from global to continental to a few kilometers. It also retrieves data for any range of years, months, and days within the year, and/or hours within the day. FetchClimate reports the uncertainty associated with the values it returns and lists the data sources it uses to fulfill the request. When multiple sources could potentially provide information on the same environmental variable, FetchClimate automatically selects the most appropriate data source. In addition, you can share your query as a single URL, enabling others to retrieve the identical information, or you can export the results as a CSV file.

  • About

    FetchClimate was developed by the Computational Science Lab at Microsoft Research Cambridge, in collaboration with Microsoft Research Connections and the Information Technologies in Science laboratory (opens in new tab), Moscow State University.

People

Portrait of Vassily Lyutsarev

Vassily Lyutsarev

Principal Research Software Development Engineer

Portrait of Sergey Berezin

Sergey Berezin

Moscow State Unitersity

Portrait of Dmitry Voytsekhovskiy

Dmitry Voytsekhovskiy

Moscow State Unitersity

Portrait of Dmitry Grechka

Dmitry Grechka

Moscow State University

Portrait of Kenji Takeda

Kenji Takeda

Director, Academic Health and AI Partnerships