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

Introducing the
Weather Observations Website (WOW)
Aidan Green, 17th October 2012.
© 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.
© Crown copyright 2012 Met Office
Talk Plan
• Why do we need more weather observations?
• The Weather Observations Website (WOW)
• description
• live demonstration
• future plans
• Questions and Answers
© Crown copyright 2012 Met Office
Applications of observations
Monitoring & forecasting the UK environment,
including high impact events
Civil contingencies & emergency response in
UK: flooding, pollution, volcanoes
Advancing our scientific
understanding of
environmental processes
Observations
Specific
applications:
transport, UK
defence,
consultancy,
health, sporting
events
© Crown copyright 2012 Met Office
Evidence basis for climate change &
variability, and to aid decisions relating to
climate impact mitigation strategies
Global
forecasts:
civil aviation,
humanitarian,
defence,
UK citizens
overseas
Initialise, constrain, monitor & verify
seasonal, interannual & decadal
forecasts
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.
© Crown copyright 2012 Met Office
Ottery St Mary hailstorm
30/10/08
© Crown copyright 2012 Met Office
© Crown copyright 2012 Met Office
Ottery St Mary hailstorm
30/10/08
Actual rainfall accumulations ~200mm,
with 25cm of hail falling in 2 hours
Copyright: www.lucidia.co.uk. (Damian Coombes)
© Crown copyright 2012 Met Office
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)
© Crown copyright 2012 Met Office
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.
© Crown copyright 2012 Met Office
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.
© Crown copyright 2012 Met Office
Live demo
http://wow.metoffice.gov.uk
© Crown copyright 2012 Met Office
© Crown copyright 2011 Met Office
© Crown copyright 2011 Met Office
© Crown copyright 2011 Met Office
• 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.
© Crown copyright 2011 Met Office
© Crown copyright 2011 Met Office
© Crown copyright 2011 Met Office
© Crown copyright 2011 Met Office
© Crown copyright 2011 Met Office
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.
© Crown copyright 2012 Met Office
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.
© Crown copyright 2012 Met Office
Any questions?
QUESTIONS
& ANSWERS
© Crown copyright 2012 Met Office