Introducing the Weather Observations Website WOW Aidan Green

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 Advancing our scientific understanding of environmental processes Observations Specific applications: transport, UK defence, consultancy, health, sporting events © Crown copyright 2012 Met Office Civil contingencies & emergency response in UK: flooding, pollution, volcanoes Global forecasts: civil aviation, humanitarian, defence, UK citizens overseas Evidence basis for climate change & Initialise, constrain, monitor & verify variability, and to aid decisions relating to seasonal, interannual & decadal climate impact mitigation strategies 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 (~1 km). 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

Ottery St Mary hailstorm 30/10/08 Actual rainfall accumulations ~200 mm, with 25 cm of

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 HTML 5 and CSS 3 standards. © Crown copyright 2012 Met Office

Live demo http: //wow. metoffice. gov. uk © Crown copyright 2012 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

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); • Ph. D 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