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Weather Observations Website (WOW)Aidan Green, 17th October 2012.
Introducing the
© Crown copyright 2012 Met Office
Weather Observations Website (WOW)
http://wow.metoffice.gov.uk/
• Over 61 MILLION observations via WOW since June 2011 launch.
• Over 2,300 weather observation sites created.
• Over 375,000 visits from 164 different countries.
• Valuable new source of real-time meteorological information, particularly in severe weather events & their onset.
Talk Plan
• Why do we need more weather observations?
• The Weather Observations Website (WOW)
• description
• live demonstration
• future plans
• Questions and Answers
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Applications of observations
Monitoring & forecasting the UK environment, including high impact events
Civil contingencies & emergency response in UK: flooding, pollution, volcanoes
Global forecasts:
civil aviation,humanitarian,
defence,UK citizens overseas
Initialise, constrain, monitor & verify seasonal, interannual & decadal
forecasts
Evidence basis for climate change & variability, and to aid decisions relating to climate impact mitigation strategies
Specific applications: transport, UK
defence,consultancy,
health, sporting events
Observations
Advancing our scientific understanding of environmental processes
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Why do we need more observations?
• Data sparse areas.
• NWP models are increasing in resolution (horizontally and vertically). For weather foresting, this has meant the ability to run operational models at cloud resolving scale (~1km). This is driving a demand for improved spatial and temporal resolution of boundary layer and surface observations;.
• Increased density of real-time observations improve forecasters knowledge of actual conditions – see example.
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Ottery St Mary hailstorm 30/10/08
Copyright: www.lucidia.co.uk. (Damian Coombes)
Actual rainfall accumulations ~200mm, with 25cm of hail falling in 2 hours
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Weather Observations Website
• Global system
• Free to use
• Google cloud based, high resilience & unlimited scalability
• Supported by UK Department for Education and Royal Met Society
• Met Office uses data in support of Public Weather Service (e.g. severe weather events)
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Weather Observations Website
• National portal for sharing weather observations
• Importance of metadata
• Manual input of data – e.g. daily climate ob
• Ad-hoc weather reports – e.g. weather photos or twitter reports to say it is snowing
• Automatic collection from automatic weather stations.
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Weather Observations Website
• Upload and download of historic datasets
• Tabular and graphical views of data for different time periods
• Built on Google App Engine, to AA accessibility standards, utilising new HTML5 and CSS3 standards.
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• The weather station is located at Moerzeke, a borough of Hamme and is centrally located between Brussels - Ghent - Antwerp. It is a rural area but partially screened by a spaced row of houses outside the village center. There is also a webcam and lightning detection system.
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Weather Observations Website
• Future Plans
• Further collaboration with schools and Department for Education to improve its use as an exciting teaching aid;
• Developments based on user feedback;
• Enable reporting of weather ‘impacts’ – floods, damaged trees or property, disruption to transport etc;
• Development of social media element (Twitter, Facebook, smartphones, forums, etc);
• PhD studentship on quality assurance and data assimilation of user contributed observations.
• Investigate collaboration with other NMS’s.
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Summary
• Observations fundamental for a National Met. Service;
• Requirements for increased density of observations are being driven by increasing resolution of numerical weather prediction models, and to assist forecasters in real-time;
• WOW – since June 2011:
• Over 61 million observations submitted;
• Over 2300 different observing sites set up;
• Over 378,000 site visits, from 164 different countries.
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