Combined Location Online Weather Data: Easy-to-use Targeted Weather Analysis for Agriculture

TL;DR

CLOWD is an accessible online platform that simplifies analysis of weather data for Australian agriculture, helping farmers understand climate impacts without technical skills.

Contribution

The paper introduces CLOWD, a user-friendly web-based tool for analyzing and comparing weather data tailored for agricultural decision-making.

Findings

CLOWD enables easy comparison of weather data across seasons.

The platform generates natural language reports for offline use.

Prototypes are available for PC and mobile devices.

Abstract

The continuing effects of climate change require farmers and growers to have greater understanding of how these changes affect crop production. However, while climatic data is generally available to help provide much of that understanding, it can often be in a form not easy to digest. The proposed Combined Location Online Weather Data (CLOWD) framework is an easy-to-use online platform for analysing recent and historical weather data of any location within Australia at the click of a map. CLOWD requires no programming skills and operates in any HTML5 web browser on PC and mobile devices. It enables comparison between current and previous growing seasons over a range of environmental parameters, and can create a plain-English PDF report for offline use, using natural language generation (NLG). This paper details the platform, the design decisions taken and outlines how farmers and growers can use CLOWD to better understand current growing conditions. Prototypes of CLOWD are now online for PCs and smartphones.