Air quality bot

The project

Using publicly available data, this social media bot posts a new air quality forecast animation to the Fediverse and Bluesky every three hours.

Air quality has profound effects on people's health and wellbeing and can potentially impact everyone's life. Although high quality forecasts are made available by various national weather services, some people prefer to be kept up to date via social media.

This inspired us to implement this automated process that posts an updated forecast animation to two popular social media sites every three hours.

The data source used is NOAA's High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) forecast model for the CONUS area. Specifically we plot the near surface smoke concentration forecast out to 18 hours lead time.

You can follow the bot to get updates pushed into your timeline on the Fediverse at https://envismo.social/@noaa_hrrr_smoke_forecast_bot

On Bluesky you can find the bot at https://bsky.app/profile/conus-smoke-forecast.envismo.social

Technology

• Python / XArray
• NOAA HRRR WRF Modelergebnisse
• FFMPEG