[cryptoz]

I love this! Am super interested in building something like this.

IMO there is even more value if this is built with a central server in mind for each weather station constructed. A network of stations working together can begin to create their own hyperlocal weather network and could even be useful in small-scale, short-term predictions.

There are some startups that do a bigger version of this and for a long time I've been wanting to build a physical weather station network.

Super cool work.

[maxioatic]

This sounds pretty neat. How many stations/ how big of area would be needed to make some predictions?

[cryptoz]

Well, I think the most important metric you can measure on the surface is atmospheric pressure. Simple temperature and humidity is generally insufficient to make good predictions - but pressure at the surface, measured across a geography, can tell you about conditions in the upper atmosphere.

I use barometers in phones for this kind of purpose. I think that a minimum of 1 quality reading per 4 sq km would represent sufficiently dense coverage to create an improvement in forecasts. But more is better, since quality can be iffy.

Some papers published by Cliff Mass et al from UW might have more info on density work. I'll try to find a link. [1] [2]

The work I do is presently just in the US on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe... with future expansion planned to allow better data acquisition. Open source code I wrote for Android for this purpose (periodically measuring pressure) https://github.com/JacobSheehy/AllClearSensorLibrary

[1] https://journals.ametsoc.org/waf/article/33/5/1375/40806/Imp...

[2] https://journals.ametsoc.org/jtech/article/35/3/523/107377/S...

[brootstrap]

Howdy, seen you posting before. I would be warey of any crowd sourced data. So now we have average american Joe running a weather station that feeds directly into our state of the art GFS model? What if joe forgets to maintain his station? How do you assert quality control?

I just am skeptical about this all. cant trust users phones to provide input for mission critical weather forecast models (GFS). Peoples lives depend on this information!

[cryptoz]

> So now we have average american Joe running a weather station that feeds directly into our state of the art GFS model?

No way. The data is quality-controlled and bias-corrected before assimilation. Any bad data is thrown out. The papers I linked above do a good job describing how this is done.

> What if joe forgets to maintain his station?

No maintenance required. Individual data points are irrelevant, this idea only works if you can throw out bad data without caring. So throw out any suspicious data.

> How do you assert quality control?

Sorry to keep directing you to the papers above, but a team of really smart people spent years on this topic and they do a better job of describing it than I could. Cliff Mass et al.

> I just am skeptical about this all.

AFAIK the Weather Channel has been providing your forecasts for some years now in Apple and Google products with all of this barometer data from phones and weather stations in backyards. If you didn't notice a strong quality decline since some years ago, then I would say it's fine. You've probably noticed a forecast quality increase during this time I'd guess.

> cant trust users phones to provide input for mission critical weather forecast models (GFS).

Why not though? What is wrong with any of this method? It is all scientifically tested, researched, peer-reviewed, published, analyzed, post-event-analysis, the whole deal.

> Peoples lives depend on this information!

Well yeah, that's why we need more data! We have so little data now that people are dying from preventable cases like a lack of storm warning or good communication about incoming weather events.

This all matters so much. Ignoring billions of deployed, internet-connected barometers is costing lives that could be saved if we used all the data available to us to make accurate weather predictions.