September 4, 2007

Citizen Weather Observer Program

Cwp Logo Many citizen weather stations are producing weather data today. When these data are used only by the weather station owners, data quality is not an issue. With the communications revolution and the vast capabilities of the internet, many people with weather stations are sending their data far and wide for other people to use. In that case, data quality matters.

The Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP) is a private-public partnership with three main goals: 1) to collect weather data contributed by citizens; 2) to make these data available for weather services and homeland security; and 3) to provide feedback to the data contributors so that they have the tools to check and improve their data quality. In fact, the web address, wxqa.com, stands for weather quality assurance. Tools that will help members improve their data quality are listed under the "Data Quality" link above left.

There are over 6,000 registered CWOP members world wide and a graph of the number of North American CWOP stations sending data over the past four days is shown under the older name APRSWXNET (APRS description). The number of world-wide citizen weather stations sending data through APRS-IS (Internet-Service) is shown for the past 4 years.

The weather data are sent by internet alone and internet-wireless combination through the APRS-IS to the findu.com server. Every 15 minutes, the data are sent from the findu.com server to the NOAA MADIS program to become part of the NOAA mesonet data set. The data are checked for quality and then redistributed to users. There are over 400 different user organizations of mesonet data. Here is a partial list:

NWS Weather Forecast Offices
National Center for Environmental Prediction
National Ocean Service
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Denver Urban Drainage and Flood Control District
Kennedy Space Center
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center
University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
MIT Lincoln Laboratories
University of Utah
Penn State University
Mississippi State University
University of Alaska
University of North Dakota
Hampton University
Texas A&M University
University of Hawaii
Florida State University

At Citizen Weather Observer Program