Real-time weather map

[senji]

A commonly suggested idea is that of a realtime weather map, that people can enter simple weather observations into ("rainy", "sunny", "stormy" etc) and have it updated on the spot. Does anyone have the web/GIS knowledge to create/help-with such a project?

Comments

[stephdairy]

This has the problem that you're rarely going to get enough and frequent enough observations from people to provide enough of an overall picture to make it interesting.

You don't need much GIS to plot things on a map. My station pages get away with a bit of PostScript (which you can download from the Ordnance Survey for free) and some perl scripts, and you're welcome to steal any of the referencing numbers I used to correlate coordinates in the PostScript outline map of Britain with the BNG.

However, unless you expect people to go and find the grid coordinates for their observations, you'll have to hook in a searchable location database and they generally aren't cheap.

(S)

[senji]

The theory was that people would typically be observing from home or work, and finding a couple of grid locations (and storing them) isn't too much work.

We (#afp) were tracking storms across the UK the other day :-).

[edith_the_hutt]

What's wrong with good ol' Satilite photography?

[senji]

That doesn't exactly tell you that it started raining in the centre of town 5 minutes ago :-)

[edith_the_hutt]

Ah, you want a real-time Cambridge weather system rather than the hourly UK updates the met has?

[senji]

Every 6 hours, from what I can see on the website. Also I can't read satellite photography ("oh, there's some cloud somewhere over england"), and the MET office weather stations aren't close enough placed.

In practice most of the people I know live in Cambridge or London, but that doesn't mean that a system couldn't be useful for other people who I don't know :-).