3 bits of news from the personal weather computing.

[elagache]

Dear WeatherCat fans,

Circumstances conspired to bring us 3 snippets of news related to computing and personal weather stations.  The first was that a rival to WeatherCat: WeatherSnoop finally got an update:

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/32585/weathersnoop

Many of us believed it had finally gone to abandoned software heaven, but apparently the developer is still kickin' at least a bit.

This leads to the second bit of odd news.  The top item in the update to WeatherSnoop was support for Weathercloud . . . . . . Weather-what!?!?!?

As if there aren't enough services soliciting data from us personal weather station owners there is yet another one:

http://weathercloud.net/

   . . . Perhaps we should start some sort of a betting pool to guess how long this one will last! 

The last bit of news is in a similar vein but perhaps should not be dismissed so lightly.  There is a San Francisco start-up firm with designs to take on the big personal weather station networks like Weather Underground called: BloomSky.  Here is an article on TechHive about it:

http://www.techhive.com/article/2453882/bloomskys-backyard-weather-stations-hope-to-crowdsource-the-forecast.html

My first impression of this was definitely skeptical.  However, reading a little more has changed my mind a bit.  Here is the specifications of the station they are trying to deploy:

http://www.bloomsky.com/spec/

The key failing it would appear is that it makes no attempt to measure wind-speed, but everything else it does in a manner that is totally owner-independent.  It is truly designed as a "plant and forget" weather station.  Between its simplicity and very low price of $169, this will attract a very different kind of weather enthusiast - the busy and lazy (aka geek?)   

This sort of a system could really be a game changer in the "broadcasting of current weather conditions" market.  Systems like Weather Underground are running into a problem that is mirrored on this forum.  Lots of people are interested in the weather, but how many people are passionate enough to really keep a weather station up and reliable?  Bad data is arguably worse than no data and plenty of people put up weather stations and then neglect them for some other pursuit.

If the stations are tough enough, the BloomSky system can be neglected and still generate good data.  At the same time, the low cost and simplicity might generate so much interest that they could have a much greater density of stations than current networks like Weather Underground.  They might be able to compensate for problems like lacking sufficient radiation shields and certainly a very dense collection of sensors could be really useful in tracking the start of rain over a region.

I find the concept deeply offensive, but I cannot argue with the realities of a populace with a very low attention span.  Like so many other things in our modern world, I sure wish every personal weather station were installed and maintained properly with meticulous care and devotion.  Given that we live in a world populated largely by mediocre human beings, this sort of a network may succeed in a mediocre way because simple machines do their job whereas the people refuse to.

Certainly not the sort of weather monitoring network we all would prefer I think, but we might come to use it anyway if becomes as successful as it might.

Cheers, Edouard 

[Blicj11]

I was a bit of a WeatherSnooper in a former life. From time to time I take a peek back on their forum. I'm much happier here.