National Weather Service and Personal Weather Stations Now Connected Through Individual's Web Site

Data from personal weather stations nationwide are now helping to fill in the gaps in National Weather Service reporting due to the work of a northern California weather enthusiast.

Joe Torsitano started weatherforyou.com in December, 1998, to make visitors more aware of personal weather stations. Often they're located many miles from the closest "official" source and can reveal significant climate differences. Joe says, "most weather web sites report conditions from the closest location, which can be twenty or more miles away. In many parts of the country there can be a big difference over this large of a range." Personal stations are located in many of the more rural locations and provide very good information.

One of Joe's goals was to have these personal stations report their information to a central location. In October of 2000 weather software writers began including the ability to automatically send current conditions to Joe's web server, one of the first in the world to accept and process this information. It was then included with local forecasts along with information about who contributed the data and their web site's address. "I wanted to make sure those sending data got credit for their efforts" says Joe. "The data isn't mine… it belongs to those who went to the effort of putting in a weather station."

Recently Joe received a call from the National Weather Service headquarters. It was a conference call between NWS staff members requesting permission to use the data people sent to Joe's web site. "That was one of the most exciting calls I received in the last three years" Joe exclaimed. "They were very humble and wanted to help me in any way possible."

The information is processed and combined into a file the National Weather Service retrieves from Joe's server several times an hour. It is then integrated with other data that is being used for research and education, and is displayed on the NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratory web site. There are over 300 people currently participating in the program.




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