Racing Pigeon Weather Report

The Homing Pigeon Weather Report provides a quick overview of weather forecasts (wind, precipitation, temperature, air pressure) at various release locations in Germany for homing pigeons and selected locations in Switzerland. This allows for the optimal release time for the pigeons to be selected on race weekends.

The report is available as a PDF and can be accessed at the URL: https://patrick-hirschi.ch/brieftauben/.

The data comes from https://www.meteomatics.com/en/. Meteomatics collects and determines the data using global and regional weather models, satellite data, radar data, lightning data, maritime data, weather drones, weather stations, digital 3D models, and air quality data. Non-commercial use allows up to 500 queries per day (one query for three locations counts as three queries) to retrieve hourly forecasts at the push of a button.

The data is then structured for each location and presented in a wind table with hourly values (wind speed and direction) color-coded.

The color coding, along with the order of locations (sorted in descending order by distance to the home loft), allows for quickly identifying where the pigeons can expect tailwinds or headwinds.

Additionally, a line chart is created for each of the evaluated locations.

The Python code needed to create the weather report is available on GitHub: https://github.com/patrick-hirschi/riro_brieftauben_statistiken/blob/main/riro_result_importer/a_weather_forecast/weather_forecast.py