Meteorology has always had a good relationship with amateur weather observers; indeed many of our earliest weather records come to us courtesy of enthusiastic Victorians diligently recording temperature, rainfall and windspeed in their back gardens.
For the last few decades, weather forecasters have relied mostly on data from professional weather stations, but now high quality measurement devices and easy internet access are enabling keen amateurs to make valuable contributions once again.
Five years ago the Met Office launched the Weather Observations Website (WOW) so that amateur observers from all over the world could send in their weather observations. Today the site receives many thousands of observations every day, particularly from urban areas.
These city observations are helping meteorologists to understand localised weather patterns, such as the urban heat island effect. Across Greater London for example, around 1,500 home weather stations fill the gaps between the ten official Met Office and Airport weather stations. As a result meteorologists have been able to identify London’s hotspots – the areas that suffer most from the urban heat island effect – and discover how the weather is impacting people and infrastructure locally.
It is still early days for this kind of citizen science weather data, and meteorologists are figuring out how to incorporate it into their models. How do you distinguish an outlandish reading from a surprising but real phenomenon for example?
Ultimately these amateur observations should improve our understanding of micro-climates and help to create more localised forecasts. And for now the amateur observations reveal a city’s warm and cool pockets, showing us where to seek relief on a sweltering day.
