Dan Vernon
Work
Research2024

Windo

Environmental modelling from terrain, solar and land-cover datasets at 5m resolution.

  • Geospatial
  • Environmental modelling
  • Data products

Problem

Useful environmental data exists — air quality stations, weather models, satellite passes — but it is sparse, mismatched in resolution, and published in incompatible formats and cadences. Most people only ever see a single nearby station reading, which can be wrong for their actual location.
High-resolution environmental data map showing interpolated air quality and wind fields rendered as a smooth gradient surface over a city region.
Fieldupdating
Sparse public observations interpolated into a continuous high-resolution field.

System

Windo ingests several open data sources on their own schedules, aligns them in space and time, and interpolates them into a continuous high-resolution field that can be queried at any point. The pipeline is incremental: new observations update only the affected region rather than recomputing the world.

Decision

Treat resolution as a modelling problem, not a data problem

Rather than wait for denser sensors, Windo treats the gaps between observations as something to estimate with uncertainty attached. Every queried value carries a confidence, so the product can be honest about where it is guessing — which matters more than a clean-looking map.

Demonstrates

An ambitious data product: heterogeneous ingestion, spatial-temporal modelling, and a calibrated sense of when not to trust the output.