UK Met Office wants your help

The UK based Met Office wants your help  as part of a new project to monitor the weather.

WOW – the Weather Observations Website – will allow thousands of weather observations to be inputted at any time  by weather watchers from around the globe.

It is expected that the new online community will start in the Spring of 2011.

Weather watchers

In partnership with the Royal Meteorological Society and supported by the Department of Education it is hoped that the new service from the Met Office will encourage further growth in the UK’s amateur weather observing community, and help educate children about the weather.

The growing world of social networking online makes it relatively easy for anyone to get involved and share their weather observations.

The purpose of the website is to provide a platform for the sharing of current weather observations. This will be regardless of where they come from, what detail of information or the frequency of reports.

Involvement can include submitting ad-hoc information such as ‘it is snowing here’, or uploading a photograph of the weather you have observed.

It also means you can submit routinely taken data from manned or automatic weather stations of high standards.

Of course, weather patterns that affect the UK develop thousands of miles away, such as over the Atlantic Ocean and because of this our forecasts rely on a range of global observations.

These include space satellites, ocean buoys, aircraft, shipping, weather balloons and those taken on the ground.

All of this global data feeds into the Met Office to produce the warnings and forecasts that the UK relies upon.

However, once launched, it is hoped that users will then use this new website to explore the British weather, looking at how it varies from place to place, moves across the country and how your location can make a difference to the weather you see.

Over time the Met Office hope WOW will build up to be an historical record of weather observations for sites across the UK.

The Met Office is an Executive Agency of the UK Ministry of Defence.