© Crown copyright 2011 Met Office

WOW - Weather Observations WebsiteCrowd-sourced weather obs for real

OGC TC 79 Brussels, 2011-11-28

Chris Little & Aidan Green, UK Met Office

Why observe the environment?

• Observations are fundamental for National Met. Services:

Initialise environmental models and verify their performance

Monitor the state of the atmosphere, oceans and climate

Understand environmental conditions at site specific locations

Underpin specific responsibilities e.g. UK Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre

• In real time they are used in the generation of all weather forecast and warning services worldwide

• When quality-controlled and archived they are the basis of weather/climate advice and provide the evidence basis for climate change

© Crown copyright 2011 Met Office

Current UK observing capabilities

Environmental monitoring satellites: geostationary (Meteosat) and polar orbiting (EPS)

Radar

Upper air & remote sensing: radiosonde (6 UK, several overseas supported), wind profiler (5 UK), AMDAR (16 airports UK), lidar/(LCBR) (~120), GPS Water Vapour (~80), ATD lightning detection (12 sites)

Marine: VOS (~350), fixed buoys and platforms around UK (16), drifting buoys (~90 European), Argo floats (~100 UK operated)

Surface Land: AWS (~250), manual climate sites (~220), (LCBR) (~ 120)

ATD lightning detection

Radar: (15) precipitation, Doppler windsArgo float

GPS Water Vapour

Wind profiler

LCBR/Lidar

© Crown copyright 2011 Met Office

Key improvements required

• NWP models are increasing resolution (horizontally and vertically)

• Operationally, now reaching cloud resolving scale (~1km horizontally)

• Potential step change in accuracy

• But needs improved spatial and temporal resolution of:

• Boundary layer profiles - wind, humidity, temperature

• Surface observations - all parameters but particularly: visibility, cloud, state of ground and precipitation type (snow boundary & small scale intense rain)

• Sustainable climate quality obs of sufficient density:

• Temp, humidity, daily precipitation, sub-ocean temp & salinity© Crown copyright 2011 Met Office

Surface Land Observations

• ~200 manual climate sites, ~280 AWS stations

• ~70 additional AWSs last 2 years – many climate sites (to maintain records and obtain data in near real-time)

• ~2800 rainfall sites (collaboration with EA)

• Meteorological Monitoring System installed:

• Old system: 5 different systems reaching obsolescence; stand-alone systems; integrating new sensors and software upgrades difficult (visit all sites);

• MMS: unified system; 1 minute data from all sensors and sites; central monitoring; greater flexibility to add new sensors and new sites; central system approach to software changes; simple AWS option;

• See ‘Weather’ October 2010 edition for more details.

• Precursors and alerts for forecasters - snow

• Weather Observations Website© Crown copyright 2011 Met Office

Weather Observations Website

• Supported by UK Department for Education and Royal Meteorological Society

• Met Office will use data in support of Public Weather Service (e.g. severe weather events)

• Data as close to real-time as possible to be most useful for severe weather – (e.g. Ottery St Mary storm flash flooding warnings)

© Crown copyright 2011 Met Office

Weather Observations Website

• National portal for submission of 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 AWS

© Crown copyright 2011 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 2011 Met Office

Live demo

http://wow.metoffice.gov.uk

© Crown copyright 2011 Met Office

Growth exceeded expectations• 1 June 2011 live

• 11 Oct 2011

• 8.6 million observations,

• Over 900 separate observation sites created,

• Over 100 different countries,

• Over 30,000 different visitors.

• 24 Nov 2011

• 12.5 million observations

• 116 countries

• Sweden to New Zealand (N-S)

• New Zealand to Canada (E-W)

Weather Observations Website

Future Plans

• Developments based on user feedback;

• Development of social media opportunities (Twitter, Facebook, smart phones, forums, etc).

• Further collaboration with schools and Department for Education to improve its use as an exciting teaching aid;

• Starting automatic Q/C for NWP use – some science first

• PhD studentship in Quality Assurance of Observational Data: A Bayesian Data Assimilation Approachhttps://wiki.aston.ac.uk/foswiki/bin/view/DanCornford/MetOfficeCASE

• International collaboration – widespread interest outside UK

© Crown copyright 2011 Met Office

Any questions?

ANYQUESTIONS?

© Crown copyright 2011 Met Office

Improvements in observations & NWP

Satellite image from 2004

Satellite image from 1964

© Crown copyright 2011 Met Office