Natural Resources - Environment Protection Division - Ventilation Index Project

British Columbia's ventilation index alert system is used by citizens to know whether or not they are allowed to perform controlled burns in various regions of the province. Previously this data was sourced from Environment Canada's ECCC Datamart where they post daily bulletins with forecast values. Recently, Environment Canada has started publishing this data in much higher resolution in the World Meteorological Organization's standard General Regularly-distributed Information in Binary form format (GRIB). This project is a first step towards modernizing British Columbia's capabilities by reading the GRIB data and reproducing the original bulletin so that our systems can continue to operate. It will allow us to produce more, and more highly detailed data in the future.

Operating Guide

Manual intervention should not be needed because the application will run every 60 minutes, and abort if there exists a report for the day. However, if necessary, but application can be triggered by manually starting the run_application github workflow.

Updating Zone Definitions and Weights

The zone definitions used by this application are the same zones that are used by the (Ventilation Index Interactive Map). The zone definitions used by the map application define multiple polygons for each zone, which would increase the runtime of this application. I have created a script that will take the union of all zones with the same name and output a compressed file suitable for use by this application.

To update the definitions follow the procedure:

1. Install uv (https://docs.astral.sh/uv/) for your platform. This software manages Python virtual environments without making any modifications to your system and will ensure that you can run the script.

2. Open a terminal in the root of your local copy of this code, and use uv to install the python development environment:

   uv sync --all-extras --dev

3. Place the updated zone definitions KML file, a GRIB2 forecast file, and the ventilation index weights csv file in the source directory and run the process_data.py script.

   uv run ./scripts/process_data.py forecast.grib2 ventilation_index_weights.csv Venting_Index_HD.kml

4. This may take several minutes to run depending on your device. It should create the point_data.csv file. Commit this to source control.

Adding new / renaming zones

If a zone name changes, or a zone is added to the system, there is a data structure that maps the zone name used on the Government of British Columbia interactive ventilation index map and the legacy ECCC report for ingestion. This structure is located in utils/output.py.

Development Requirements

• uv (https://docs.astral.sh/uv/) for python version and dependency management.
• ruff (comes bundled with uv), run uvx ruff check, or better yet, install the editor extension and let it do all the work.

To set your environment up for development run uv sync --all-extras --dev to automatically deploy a python virtual environment. This includes the ruff formatter. To run the application run uv run main.py.