Friday, February 8, 2019

WOW in schools

WOW is a platform for anybody to submit, share and display their weather observations. A couple of new sites have recently appeared on WOW, linked to Primary Schools who have opted to join the WOW community. 

The Beacon Church of England (VA) Primary School, Exmouth, Devon, are now sharing their observations on WOW:





Mum of two, Debbie, decided to purchase a weather station for this school. After doing some research she opted for a Watson W-8681 wireless weather station. With the help of one of the teachers and the school's I.T specialist they built the weather station and mounted it on the roof of the school:




Advice about how to best site a weather station can be seen here. It may be difficult to find the perfect location, particularly in an urban environment. However if you share details on your weather station's exposure when setting up your WOW site, any siting issues can be taken into account, making the data more useful to others. More details on how to rate your site in WOW can be seen here. Once up and running the majority of weather stations will require some additional software in order to link them up to WOW. There are a number of freely available third party software packages, some of which are listed on this page. The WOW team are always looking to add more options to this list, if you want to share your software please comment below or send us some feedback. The Beacon School decided to use Cumulus weather station software to link their weather station to WOW.  This is currently running on a laptop, but the school are investigating using a Raspberry Pi to reduce running costs. 


St George's Catholic Primary School, Taunton, Somerset, have also recently set up their own weather station, with a little help from Dad Adrian. They installed a Davis Pro 2 Weather Station. In order to log and visualise the data from this weather station a data logger and the Davis 'WeatherLink' software are required. Once this was all up and running Adrian used Cumulus software to start uploading the data to WOW. This weather station has been mounted on a long pole on the side of a building to improve it's exposure: