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

© Crown copyright 2012 Met Office Weather Observations Website (WOW) 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.

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 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 © Crown copyright 2012 Met Office

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

Ottery St Mary hailstorm 30/10/08 Copyright: (Damian Coombes) Actual rainfall accumulations ~200mm, with 25cm of hail falling in 2 hours © 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 © Crown copyright 2012 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

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