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Space-Time Cube Mapping for Weather Station Data

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06-18-2020 06:51 PM
GeorgeHademenos
New Contributor

I am a high school physics teacher in Texas who would like to display weather station data in a Space-Time Cube map. I have spent hours going over Help pages and going through posts in GeoNet but have not had success. I would like to reach out for guidance on how to proceed. The data that I have is in Microsoft Excel, presented in three columns: Julian Day (numbered days of the year), temperature & pressure, and the year. I envision that Julian Day will be graphed along the x-axis, the variables temperature & pressure graphed along the y-axis and the z-axis is the year. I would like to create two space-time cube maps – one illustrating the temperature data and the other illustrating the pressure data. I have downloaded and successfully installed the Space-Time Cube add-in to ArcGIS 2.5. When I added data, I got no response with no indication of the problem. I thought that ArcGIS would take the data and make necessary transformations. As I read through the Help pages, I found out that the data must be in netCDF format. I tried to convert the Excel file to the netCDF format using MyGeoData Cloud site but kept getting error messages because the x and y columns were not GPS coordinates. The questions I have are:  (1) Is it possible to display this type of data in a Space-Time Cube map? (2) How should I format my Excel data to make it readable and usable for a Space-Time Cube map? (3) Does each column variable in the Excel file need to be labeled or does labeling occur after the Space-Time Cube map is created? (4) Can the data be displayed in separate worksheets or does all of the data need to be in a single worksheet?  I would greatly appreciate your time and assistance with this request.

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4 Replies
DavidPike
MVP Frequent Contributor

I'll need to read up on the o'l space-time cube again but I thought there was only 1 temporal element transferred as a z-axis value, x ad y are spatial and the magnitude of pressure etc is stored as the cube value? I don't see how you can map the julian day in x or y without destroying any spatial relation? Can you just use a datetime as input?

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GeorgeHademenos
New Contributor

Good point, David. But this leaves me confused and wondering exactly how the Space-Time Cube is used to display data from a weather station. I have seen reference to this in Esri PowerPoints and videos but without examples. Could you tell me what data is used to reflect the two spatial coordinates and the one temporal coordinate? I think once I see an example or get a better feel for the data represented along the three axes, I will be able to get a better sense on how to adapt my data to conform.

George Hademenos

Physics Teacher

Richardson High School

Learning today for tomorrow's possibilities

RHS Mission

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DavidPike
MVP Frequent Contributor

Hi George, I've only used these cubes as inputs for geostatistics not visualisation (I can see visualisation tools are now in pro which i'll need to have a gander at), but I'm pretty confident they're not intended for use in this manner (i.e. data from single station). Also each cubelet is designed to have a magnitude, rather than a kind-of 3d graph which I believe you are envisaging.

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GeorgeHademenos
New Contributor

Thank you so much, David, for your comments and insight. You have been very helpful.

George Hademenos

Physics Teacher

Richardson High School

Learning today for tomorrow's possibilities

RHS Mission

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