Home weather station support

[Tim Vasquez]

Some programming work on Digital Atmosphere is going to begin in the next week or two. V1.1j3 remains the newest version.

I do want to find out whether you think there is poor support in the weather community for home weather stations. I have found that it is pretty much impossible to view other people's home weather station data in a map format without using a commercial site's "front end viewer". It seems there needs to be an open-source interchange standard and someone to make collective sets of data freely available on a server. Then anyone could use any type of software to draw maps, including Digital Atmosphere.

I checked with one home weather station package I like (VWS), but it appears they're already in a partnership with wunderground and it would be against their interests to support such a standard. Maybe I will have to build a home weather station package from the ground up that has this support.

To reiterate, this would not be Digital Atmosphere reading data off your home weather station, but rather a separate program reading this data and sharing it, which Digital Atmosphere could then retrieve from a server.

Tim

[hoevenm]

Well, I agree there is limited support. But that limit is because there are only a very few huge players in this weather-world that accumulate and dessiminate "hobby"-data. Like wunderground indeed.

But, I am interested in your idea. It would benefit the DAWS-world when a lot more data comes available.

[kinetic]

Over at the Weather Display software forum they are doing something like this with a meso map live feature.

http://www.weather-watch.com/smf/

[wxforecaster]

The only problem i would see with this is bad data and geting that data into your maps and equations. Will there be a program to not let that happen?

[carseman]

Tim,
I would second kinetic's suggestion concerning Weather Display. Get in touch with Brian Hamilton, the developer of weather Display via the Weather Display website at http://www.weather-display.com. The url that kinetic mentioned is for the Weather Display forum. Brian is very receptive to ideas and collaborations that benefit the weather station community.

Chris

[rolsch]

Hi Tim,
i hope my english was not to bad for this post-theme and i understand the last post's:

Have an look to this nice projects:

http://www.awekas.at/en/index.php
- used Software for data-input:

WSWIN (PC-Weatherstation) from Werner Krenn (can create synop and metar!)
Weather Display
Virtual Weather Station
Weather Link
WS2500 (Linux) by Rainer Krienke (http://www.krienke.org)
further software on request
there is also the possibility of entering values manually

http://www.gdhm.de/synopkarten.html
-> used Software for data-input: http://www.weather-display.de/ and http://www.pc-wetterstation.de/forum/in ... ge=english
-> Synop-Mails from people's home weather station to GdHM

Many people's home weather station transmit data to this projects.

With an centalized server who collect this data - voilá - DAWP has fresh data from many home weather station

Hint/idea:

- tell Othmar Gattringer, the publisher and coordinator from the awekas-project for an DAWP-interface or datadirectory...
-> http://www.awekas.at/forum/index.php?c=2

[SoFlaChris]

Tim,

I use Davis' WeatherLink to post to the CWOP and WU. I would love to participate in an alternate program or try another "bleeding-edge" suite.

Chris

[Al Pietrycha]

I know I’ve written about the following before but I’d like to remind everyone how helpful your home weather data is to your local NWSFO. If you are sending your observations to the CWOP, those observations arrive into AWIPS which can then be incorporated in a surface map or used for OBAN surface analysis (MSAS or LAPS), and the obs can be VERY helpful with fcst and/or warning verification.

So please, keep sending your obs to the CWOP.

--Al Pietrycha

Tim,

I use Davis' WeatherLink to post to the CWOP and WU. I would love to participate in an alternate program or try another "bleeding-edge" suite.

Chris

[SoFlaChris]

I will always continue to send my CWOP data as I know that it is utilized by the local NWS office.

[thegreatdr]

All weather stations that submit into CWOP/APRSnet make it into the FSL/GSD mesonet. Plus, you have other mesonets such as MesoWest and the Oklahoma Mesonet that get included. It might be an idea, if you haven't tried acquiring the data from them yet.

DR