NY Times Article: 'Hobbyists Fill Out the Weather Map'

From the Thursday New York Times “Technology” Section
‘Hobbyists Fill Out the Weather Map’

December 30, 2004
By TIM GNATEK

GREG TRUTA works long hours as an accountant, but that
hasn’t stopped him from developing a sideline as the
neighborhood weatherman in Broomfield, Colo., a suburb of
Denver.

Mr. Truta, 33, was so fascinated by the weather moving off
of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains that he mounted a
personal weather station in his backyard to monitor it.
Soon he decided to share his data by posting it online. He
connected his instruments to a computer and began uploading
live readings, along with National Weather Service
forecasts and even a Webcam view of the mountains to his
Web site, www.broomfieldweather.com.

His site has become a resource for those in his area and
beyond, logging more than 98,000 page views in the last 18
months. “I’ve gotten e-mails from all over Colorado, even
on the East Coast,” he said. For those hooked on Broomfield
weather, Mr. Truta offers an e-mail system that sends out
weather updates three times a day.

His audience includes professional meteorologists, like
those at Denver’s ABC affiliate, KMGH, who have used his
station data in their forecasts. “They told me they needed
a temperature for northwest Denver, and were using my
temperatures on the 5 o’clock news,” he said.

Mr. Truta is not alone. Thousands of armchair sky watchers
are pairing computers and consumer-grade meteorological
equipment to share their observations of local conditions
online. Posted on personal Web sites or community weather
pages, the data is helping neighbors and beginning to have
a larger impact on meteorology, by shaping a more detailed
view of weather patterns than was previously available.

“We use those reports,” said Mike Nelson, KMGH’s chief
meteorologist. “It’s been useful for television to get more
reports from all kinds of locales, compared to just the
airport. The old joke goes, no one lives out there.”

Even without building Web sites, backyard meteorologists
can contribute to the professional weather world. They can
send their data to a number of organizations that aggregate
the information and post it online.

One such group that has achieved official recognition is
the Citizen Weather Observer Program (www.cwop.net), an
association of weather watchers who collect information,
share it online, and forward it to outlets like the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s giant
pool of freely available weather research data, the
Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System. Information
from 1,900 of the 4,000 personal weather stations
registered with the observer program makes its way to the
National Weather Service forecast offices, the Kennedy
Space Center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research
and university research programs, among other destinations.

“The data goes to 80 percent of the weather forecast
offices in the U.S.,” said Russ Chadwick, the senior
engineer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration’s forecast systems laboratory in Boulder,
Colo., and volunteer administrator of the citizen observer
program’s network.

“It’s helpful in places where there are fewer official data
points, and where we have quite a number of stations,” he
said. “The conventional weather network might have 70
kilometers between observations, and sometimes we have
stations in those areas that are just 10 kilometers apart.”

James Scarlett is a weather professional who takes
advantage of the observer program’s network. As the warning
coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service
in Billings, Mont., Mr. Scarlett was in a position to
recognize the shortage of official observations from the
southeastern part of the state. He mobilized amateur radio
operators to collect weather data around Forsyth, a rural
town where there were no official weather stations.

Now, information from nearly a dozen personal weather
stations channels into findu.com, an affiliate of the
observer program for amateur band broadcasters, and Mr.
Scarlett can analyze the data before issuing weather alerts
and wildfire warnings for the northern Rockies.

“We’ve always struggled to get information from out there,
and it’s been great,” Mr. Scarlett said. “The more data we
get from the field, the better our forecasting.”

A number of other Web sites collect personal weather
station information and offer it online for use by amateur
and professional meteorologists.

Anythingweather.com and weatherforyou.com members share
personal weather data, which is displayed alongside
official reports in a series of interactive state maps.

They will be joined next year by WeatherBug, an
advertising-supported software program that, its publishers
say, is installed on over seven million desktops.
WeatherBug plans to augment data collected from its network
of 7,000 school-based weather stations with personal
weather data in early 2005. Seventy-seven TV stations use
WeatherBug data on neighborhood conditions in their local
weather reporting.

The neighborhood reports have helped meteorologists like
Justin Derk, of WMAR-TV in Baltimore, zero in on difficult
forecasts like predicting the often vague rain and snow
lines during winter storms.

“I was able to pick up four stations and see a temperature
difference between the north and south side, and draw that
line,” he said. “For the people watching us that day,
knowing what street they live on, we were nailing precisely
who was getting rain and who was getting snow.”

Perhaps the most popular site for budding meteorologists is
Weather Underground (www.wunderground.com). For nearly
three years, the site has allowed weather watchers to add
their stations to a growing regional list. Weather
Underground reports a worldwide membership of 12,092
personal weather stations; more than 3,200 provide daily
uploads to the site.

For some hobbyists, monitoring the weather means more than
merely predicting fair skies or foul.

One volunteer in the observer program, David Helms, a
National Weather Service scientist in Silver Spring, Md.,
who also operates a personal weather station, became
interested in the hobby for national security reasons.

“I joined C.W.O.P. soon after Sept. 11, 2001,” he said.
“There were lots of reports of terrorists wanting to use
crop-dusters to spread chemical and biological agents, so I
started researching how one could contribute weather data
that might help with urban dispersion forecasts.”

Regardless of how it is used, the personal weather data
displayed on these sites provides a perceived element of
control over something technology has yet to master.
Despite meteorologists’ efforts, there is only so much they
can do about the weather.

“We have the couch-potato philosophy on storm chasing,” Mr.
Helms said. “You don’t chase it. It chases you.”

At least amateur analysts have the satisfaction of knowing
that their on-demand information is often more up to date
and more adaptable than what is available through
traditional news sources.

“Why let the TV man control the graphics?” Mr. Helms said.
“You can control the data right from your couch.”

Please visit the NY Times for the on-line story (free registration required):
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/30/technology/circuits/30weat.htmlex=1105367194&ei=1&en=e126b81984e091cd


Nice article, and nice plug for WD!

Nice article, and nice plug for WD!
yes, I agree too :) you just never know what email you will get and what news it will be sometimes :)

Those product placements are everywhere!

Happy New Year!

Dave