OPEN WEATHER DATA PROJECT

[Part of the "transparency" category. Responsible: Jakke Mäkelä]

Weather, in my opinion, is an area in which truly “data wants to be free”. Amateur weather stations are improving in quality; the Internet can transmit data in real time; and various meteorological institutes are sitting on large stockpiles of data which have already been gathered with taxpayer money. Although I seldom take a clear stand politically, on this one   my opinion is solidifying: All weather data should be freely available.

The situation varies from country to country, but overall the pressure is definitely going in the right direction. It takes no great vision to predict that within say five years, most or all government-collected weather information will be available to citizens in real time. This is an improvement from the current situation, since amateur weather stations cannot fully replace professional measurements. Their placements and calibrations cannot be guaranteed, and for example in lightning detection the amateur stations are little better than toys.

This is therefore a good time to start thinking about applications that may be implementable in some countries already, and will be implementable in most countries within some years. In Zygomatica, we focus less on the more “serious” uses of such data, since those are under active work in many quarters already and we have little to add. Rather, we generally try to focus on applications that may seem trivial or even ridiculous. Lessons learned from such projects might have use elsewhere.

INDIVIDUAL SUBPROJECTS

Subproject: Weathercaching.  “Let’s enhance geocaching so that you get more points for finding a cache in really horrible weather.” We studied this in rather great depth with a number of collaborators. The application in itself is not likely to lead to anything practical. There are difficulties in defining what “horrible” means (some possibilities are hinted at by parameters such as wind chill, but there is no general definition). The test case was in Finland; using a combination of airport data and road weather stations, it would be possible to determine a real-time “misery index”. Such an index might have use elsewehere.