© Crown copyright 2012 Met Office Weather Observations Website (WOW) Aidan Green, 17 th October 2012. Introducing the

© Crown copyright 2012 Met Office

Weather Observations Website (WOW)Aidan Green, 17th October 2012.

Introducing the


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.

http://wow.metoffice.gov.uk/

Talk Plan

• Why do we need more weather observations?

• The Weather Observations Website (WOW)

• description

• live demonstration

• future plans

• Questions and Answers


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


http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/draft_cc_bill/index.html

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.


Ottery St Mary hailstorm 30/10/08



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


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)



• 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.



• 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.


Live demo

http://wow.metoffice.gov.uk





• 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.







• 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.


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.


Any questions?

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS


Documents

© Crown copyright 2012 Met Office Weather Observations Website (WOW) Aidan Green, 17 th October 2012. Introducing the