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Personal Weather Stations Helping With Weather Forecasting
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Jan 20, 2008 03:37 AM
from the forecast-your-own-nipper dept.
from the forecast-your-own-nipper dept.
Weather Storm writes "Weather information from thousands of personal weather stations are being used for weather forecasting by several private and government agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Citizens Weather Observation Program (CWOP) was created by a few amateur radio operators experimenting with transmitting weather data with packet radios, but it has expanded to include Internet-only weather stations as well. As of September 2007, nearly 5,000 stations worldwide reported weather data regularly to CWOP's FindU database. The weather data is forwarded every 15 minutes to NOAA's Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS), checked for temporary and spatial consistency, than utilized by computer forecast models and internal forecast verification programs. In a Febuary 2007 report (PDF) DHS listed CWOP as a national assets to the 'BioWatch' Network, stating that data from personal weather stations could be useful in weather forecasts for hazardous releases. In 2007, the FindU server received 422,262,687 weather reports which is a 29.5% increase over 2006." The personal weather stations certainly come in stylish shapes.
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Installation Guidelines? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Installation Guidelines? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Open source weather (Score:3, Informative)
enter your zip code
There is a box on the page called "Current Conditions." Scroll to the bottom of that box and click on the link called "Google Map of Personal Weather Stations." Here is an example link:
http://www.wunderground.com/stationmaps/gmap.asp?zip=94608&magic=1&wmo=99999 [wunderground.com]
Each of the station icons, which indicate current conditions, can be clicked on to access much more detailed current conditions and often extensive history as well. I'm lucky that a nearby
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
DOH (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Mixed opinions (Score:5, Insightful)
There has been tremendous pressure from commercial weather interests to devalue the NOAA/NWS, to decrease its funding, to cripple its information distribution, in favor of making people pay to get the sort of weather data that NOAA has been distributing for free ever since they were chartered. I'm happy to see that new programs with public participation and cooperation are still being created. WX data is crucial for everyone, let's keep it open and free and public.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mixed opinions (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not an NWS employee but I do work with them on several projects. I've been present when some of the private sector have called for NWS to stop giving away data, forecasats, etc., to the public... just as long as they kept giving it away for free to the private companies. This isn't right. It's just plain wrong.
I do participate in CWOP, and several of my projects benefit from MADIS. Both of these are really cool projects, and they really do help improve weather forecasting both by allowing more data for data assimilation, whereby we use real world observations to enhance the data for the models, AND by allowing for more data for forecast verifications. NWS would love to have the funding to place more weather stations under their direct control out there for these purposes. Congress has seen fit to not make that possible. MADIS is an example of of a stellar program to gather in data from a variety of sources, and then to process it to afford some indication of data quality based on neighbor-comparison, reasonableness and internal consistency. CWOP is a sign of citizens volunteering their data to allow a really good Federal Agency to do their jobs better.
Oh, and while I'm at it, NWS is one of the few agencies who compute and use real metrics for performance, including how well their forecasts perform. So many other agencies seem to create metrics designed to prove they simply know how to play the game. I've gotten to see the process surrounding how they look at storm-based warning evaluations, and the effort going into making sure the evaluations mean something, and that they represent what's really happening were eye-opening for me.
Yeah, they are doing it right.
Parent
Jim Hansen (Score:2)
A public servant who really does serve the public, what will they think of next?
Troll food (Score:3, Interesting)
"In 1981 Hansen and a team of scientists at Goddard had reached the conclusion that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would lead to global warming sooner than previously predicted. While other climatoligists had already predicted that a trend would be apparent by 2020, Hansen predicted, in a paper published in Science, that the change was already occurring and that there would record high temperatures as early as 1990. He also predicted that it
NOAA to be trusted? (Score:2)
Wasn't NOAA evil? I thought that was RIAA's submarine division. ;-)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Davis WS (Score:5, Informative)
Grants (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Grants (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Computer climate/weather models use finite element analysis [wikipedia.org]. If they get enough data to improve the resolution of the models, and enough computing power to make use of the better resolution, then yes the predictions should improve.
Disclaimer:IANAMeterologist
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Re:Grants (Score:4, Informative)
We don't need grants, just people willing to maintain a personal weather station and share data.
Now, I live in an area with a lot of federal land (a national park, forest and recreation area). It would be useful, since the ranger stations already are equipped with weather stations, if they could add their observations to the CWOP, or get them to NOAA somehow, but I'm sure that would require an act of congress, and be way over the top as far as cost/value of the info.
Parent
Applications of distributed technology (Score:4, Insightful)
It will be interesting to see what other sorts of projects in this vein take shape in the near future.
Weather Underground and Google Maps (Score:5, Informative)
If you've never seen it, Weather Underground uses Google Maps [wunderground.com] and overlays all the personal weather stations (PWS)in an area view. They even have a published iGoogle gadget [google.com].
Huh? (Score:2)
I think he meant "temporal".
A Similar Sort of Organization (Score:3, Interesting)
Look Out the Window (Score:3, Interesting)
I really suggest that before these services post data like this that they look out the window first.
Computers, data, NEXRAD and all are fine but, they often are blind too. I would guess that along the Rocky Mountains that the weather service is correct about 65% of the time. The other 35% they are so far off that it is amazing. We've had an inch of rain when it is reported clear skies and good weather. We've had snow on clear days. We've had clear days when the weather service reports cloudy...
My dad was piloting a plane out of Kansas City when he was told to take a heading directly into a huge thunderhead. He told the center that there was a huge thunderhead in front of him on that heading. The center told him there wasn't -- nothing on the radar. My dad asked the controller to...Look Out The Window. He was given directions around the storm. It's no wonder that weather is a part of learning to fly.
Best advice - look out the window.
Re: (Score:2)