Via one of the many mailing lists I’m on, I’ve become aware of the Citizen’s Weather Oberserver Program (CWOP). This program was started by amateur radio operators and looks like a great use of ham radio. Basically, hams with weather stations collect data and transmit it via the packet radio network to a an NOAA server for archiving. Here’s what their website has to say:
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.
There are over 6,000 registered CWOP members worldwide…CWOP members send their weather data by internet alone and internet-wireless combination to the findU server and then every 15 minutes, the entire data set is sent from the findU server to the NOAA MADIS server. The data are checked for quality and then redistributed to users. There are over 500 different user organizations of mesonet data.
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