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It wasn't really mentioned but there is a program where weather enthusiasts can submit readings from their automated weather stations to a service, which provid
by chrissnell 10y ago
It wasn't really mentioned but there is a program where weather enthusiasts can submit readings from their automated weather stations to a service, which provides them (in bulk) to various data consumers. Some of the consumers produce consumer weather sites (Weather Underground, for example) and others are scientific users who aggregate the data and do statistical analysis. In most towns, there's at least one enthusiast submitting data, so when you average all of these thousands of collectors, it can cancel out the effects of the methodology changes described in the article above.
On a side note, I have a weather station in my back yard and I wrote my own software in Go to collect and graph data from it. The station is a Davis Instruments Vantage Pro 2, which is a decent "pro-sumer" level station like you might find on the roof of a fire department or ski patrol building.
My software is called gopherwx. It doesn't have CWOP support yet or any documentation but you can check it out here:
https://github.com/chrissnell/gopherwx https://github.com/chrissnell/gopherwx
I have the data feeding into InfluxDB and graphing via Rickshaw on my site, which updates the readings in real-time every three seconds:
https://mhkweather.com/ https://mhkweather.com/
- vvanders 10y agoPretty common to see that data on APRS.fi as well, I wonder how much overlap there is.
- chrissnell 10y agoIt is--the protocol is the same, I believe. The APRS-IS network feeds data into CWOP. Non-ham users use their CWOP callsign, licensed amateurs use their ham callsign.
- jackmott 10y agoyou can pretty well reproduce the same trends with ~300 stations in random positions around the globe too, as long as you can find a set of 300 that are all unchanged over the duration you look at. Using thousands and doing a proper grid is good, but it is illustrative of how robust the trend is that you can pick it up with even an amateur effort.
- abraae 10y agoOff topic but it sounds like you know your weather stations, are there any cheaper than the Davis you would recommend?
- chrissnell 10y agoMy dad has the Accurite that's sold at Costco and Amazon. He loves it. It's decently accurate--enough for a home user--and not expensive at all. He was supposedly going to send me one and I was going to extend gopherwx to support it but he hasn't yet. I can't imagine that the protocol will be difficult. Davis's protocol was designed in the early 90s for serial lines and is binary to optimize for space and speed on early PCs. It was kind of a pain in the ass to implement a driver for it.
- abraae 10y agoAwesome, thank you.