Interpolating Weather Station Data using the Smart-Map Plugin in QGIS

Introduction

This Tutorial is about using the smart map plugin to interpolate climate data for the province of Ontario in July 2025.

Setting up The Tutorial

For the Tutorial the Smart Map Plugin is required. To do this, go to Plugins > Manage and Install Plugins. A window will pop up showing all the available plugins. Search for the Smart Map plugin select it and then click install

You will need to download the smart-map files onto your computer in order for the plugin to work. You can download the files from the QGIS website.

Data Preparation and Processing

Go to https://climate.weather.gc.ca/ and go to Monthly Climate summaries. Download the summaries in csv format. Feel free to select a province, month, or year. For this Tutorial We will be doing the province of Ontario for July 2025.

Open the csv in excel to ensure that the right file is downloaded

In QGIS, go to Add layer > Add delimited text layer. Search for the table. Under Geometry types, select Longitude as the x value and latitude as the y value as seen below

Using the Smart Map Plugin

Click on the Smart map Icon as highlighted below

A window will pop up. For the input layer choose the climate summary layer. For the z layer, any variable can be chosen but in the example we will be doing Tm which is temperature. Hit import when done.

The second tab is the grid. You can adjust the varibales as desired

The third tab is the interpolation. Adjust the variables as desired. Hit interpolate when done

When interpolate is clicked, you should get an output of something like this.