Bureau of Meteorology Weather Observation Website (WOW Australia)

In January 2025, the Bureau of Meteorology (https://bom-wow.metoffice.gov.uk/) will stop hosting the Weather Observations Website (WOW Australia). For all registered users who wish to continue to use the service you can do so through the WOW UK website: https://wow.metoffice.gov.uk/.

Uploading of weather station data and login account details will remain unchanged. 

 

For any questions please contact wow@metoffice.org.uk

UX Rollback

As you may be aware, the Met Office have been working on some changes to improve the user experience of WOW, as well as website accessibility for a while now. However, since the release last Thursday we’ve received a few concerns from users in regards to inputting observational data.  

Your observations are incredibly important to us, and your usability is our priority. As a result, we’ve made the decision to rollback the UX and accessibility changes, until we can fix the issues. In effect, this means we have reinstated the old version of the website temporarily, so you can input your observations as before.

VCN users can now enter missing days data, and bulk uploads can be retried.

We apologise for the inconvenience and as ever, appreciate your support.

UX Upgrades to WoW

UPDATE: The release date for these changes will be September 26th 2024.

As you may have seen in one of our earlier blogs, we have been planning some big changes to upgrade WOW to a more user friendly website.  

The reason we have decided to do these upgrades is due to user feedback over the years and our desire to grow WOW even more by encouraging more users to sign up and start submitting data to WOW, which in turn helps us to produce more accurate weather forecasts.  

I am pleased to announce that the development work is almost complete, and we are hoping to be able to launch the changes in August September. Please note, there may be a small outage of WOW services while we implement these changes. We will notify users closer to the time with the exact implementation schedule. 

The changes to the site will be significant with a new homepage and supporting pages to guide users through the process of setting up a weather station and contributing to WOW. The site registration and manual upload of observations forms have also been reviewed and simplified. Whilst the look and feel of the site will change to make the user experience more friendly, the functionality will remain the same. Users will still be able to submit and download data in addition to viewing observations via the map page.  

We will ensure that ‘how to’ documentation is available for the launch to help users adjust to the new look. These changes have been a long time coming and we hope you will like them! 

Tenby Weather Station Blog

Tenby Weather Station is one of the oldest in Wales and possibly the longest running. It has been in several locations, but its present location has been the same since 1969. The ‘station’ is comprised of two separate sites, the Stevenson Screen at the golf course and the Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorder located at the top of the tower on Castle Hill, which overlooks the harbour, Castle Beach and with views to Caldey Island.

There is a fairly long list of volunteers that have been prepared to venture out in all (most) weathers to take readings and feed them back to the Met Office. The more recent (last 25 or so years) volunteers took over from a gentleman by the name of Mr Harold Hewitt. Dickie and Trisha Putwain became involved in mid-1995 when Dickie took most of the readings and Trisha assisted and telephoned the readings in on a daily basis. Dickie attended the Climatological Observers’ course in October 1996, with Trisha attending the course in November 1999. A Certificate celebrating 105 years of the Tenby Weather Station was received by Dickie and Trisha in April 1997. The station is now in it’s 131^st year! 

Unfortunately, Dickie passed away in May 2003, at which time Trisha then took over the responsibility for the station. Their daughter Rosie, who had helped with taking readings, continued to help her mum. There were several local people who also assisted to cover holidays and occasions when Trisha and Rosie were not able to do the readings. Trisha continued, to great extent on her own for seven years, by which time it was getting quite a task. My wife worked in the same school as Trisha, and Trisha happened to mention that it was getting a bit much and wished she had some regular help. My wife very kindly volunteered my services, without me knowing at that point, which led to me becoming a volunteer in January 2010.  

Trisha and I, and with the assistance of Rosie when her and her mum ‘house swapped’ in the summer, kept up with observations for a few years, but Trisha was struggling with walking and so a call for more volunteers went out. We were fortunate to have some local interest with a small number of local people volunteering for various lengths of time. We were very fortunate to receive interest from Diana & David Bradley who joined the team. Work circumstances often becomes a barrier for volunteers who unfortunately then are not able to help out for long. Some volunteer for a few years and then find the commitment can become problematic or restrictive. For 3 or 4 years we had a reliable group of volunteers but then lost a couple due to changes of circumstances. A couple of years later and my work circumstances changed meaning I would not be available as often and potentially create gaps in readings, therefore, another call for volunteers went out. Luckily, we were joined by Richard Harries and Harry Gardener. We were very fortunate that Di and David, who are both retired teachers, are still assisting and have been of great assistance for quite a few years now. 

Richard, who was born on the family farm in Pembrokeshire, has for most of his life had a ‘close relationship’ with the weather. Farming is obviously very dependant on the weather, but Richard went into the Merchant Navy after undertaking a Marine Engineering Apprenticeship qualifying as an Officer. This took him on travels all around the world experiencing 120-foot waves, crashing through frozen seas, and ‘melting’ in the tropics and the Middle East. As if the weather wasn’t enough to deal with, there was the added fun of trying to avoid hitting the rocks going through the Madagascar channel and having to deal with limpet mines being attached to the large crude carrier tankers that he worked on!

When Richard left the Merchant Navy, he got married, and his work became varied including such things as Security, Lecturer in Electronic, Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, Software Documenter, and an Engineer in a local cheese factory where he learnt that stormy weather could curdle the huge trays of processed cheese!

Harry saw an appeal requesting for extra helpers with weather recording, so decided that as he was retired and living in and loving Tenby, volunteered for helping with collecting and changing the sunshine cards.  Harry was aware of the glass ‘orb’ and the way it is designed such that the sun marks or burns the card providing record of the sunshine hours on the card each day. As Harry puts it, ‘I knew it was in a superbly romantic location, so I selflessly volunteered to regularly climb to the most superb 360 viewpoint in Tenby two early evenings about 5pm each week’.

The Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorder is mounted on the top wall of the north side of a medieval tower (a remnant of Tenby Castle) that is the highest point on Castle Hill. Once you have climbed up to it you find complete uninterrupted 360-degree views over the sea and back over the town.

About twenty yards away north you can look down on the head and figure of a statue of a cloaked Prince Albert on an impressive pillar surrounded by seats for the glorious views, with a grand set of wide steps up to him.  This is the Welsh Albert Memorial raised by public subscription. He faces the other way onto the town and into Wales.

Castle Tower is accessed via a heavy, triple locked, studded, wooden door, and once inside, you ascend a spiral staircase. At first floor level there is access to the side tower and continuing up to the next level brings you to the battlement atop the side tower. Then you turn and climb up onto the somewhat open and exposed top battlement of the higher tower, which faces out to sea on three sides, and the glass sphere gleaming within the Campbell-Stokes frame sits on top of the north wall.

The Stevenson Screen has been located at the Tenby Golf Course since 1969. It was relocated in the spring of 2023, but only a short distance from its original location, due to some redevelopments of the Golf Course facilities being undertaken. The photographs below were taken on particularly cold mornings (10/01/2021 & 23/01/2021), and unusually icy, for the location.

 

My interest in the weather started way before becoming a volunteer weather observer, dating back to my childhood growing up in Norfolk. We lived on the second highest hill in Norfolk, which really isn’t very high, and experienced some fascinating weather events that intrigued me. I was also a keen CB Radio enthusiast with a fantastic communication range due to the elevated location, also experiencing weather impacts on radio communications. Sometimes restricting communication to only a few miles and other times (in certain conditions) able to communicate thousands of miles!

My career in environmental work has many associations with the weather, particularly air pollution which has been a major part of my work. I have been involved with monitoring environmental impacts, developing policy and regulations, also regulating industry, and advocating behavioural change to improve the environment within which we live. 

I am fortunate that my employers, Environmental Compliance Limited, understand the links between what the business does and how it relates to the weather, so are happy for me to take a little bit of time out of the working day to undertake weather observations. As a business, we make use of weather data for a range of purposes to assist clients meet their environmental obligations and also to promote sustainable business practice to help improvement of the environment for everyone. This data is purchased from the MET Office as being the most reliable data to use. This is down to the large number of volunteers that undertake daily observations across the country at specific times of day and in methodical and consistent ways.

There is something very rewarding about volunteering for something that, whilst individually seems a very small gesture, contributes towards providing data that can be used in so many ways to help build resilience and help deliver the mechanisms for future forecasting that will hopefully help save lives in the future as the weather patterns change over the coming decades.

Oliver Matthews

Tenby Weather Station Coordinator

On behalf of, and with grateful thanks to, the Tenby Weather Team.

(Dedicated to Trisha Putwain – an absolute inspiration and friend)

 

Environment Agency rainfall data now available in WOW!

The Met Office and Environment Agency have a long history of working together in partnership. One of the many things that unites the two agencies is our involvement in citizen science, and our networks of voluntary observers, such as those that contribute to WOW.

 Alongside their manual rainfall observers, the Environment Agency operate a network of approximately 1000 automatic telemetered rain gauges across England. These automatic rain gauges measure the amount of precipitation falling at their given location. The data from these gauges is used by the Environment Agency to provide flood warnings and forecasts, and to manage other water resources.

A Rainfall API* from the Environment Agency is now available, providing accumulated rainfall totals from this network at 15-minute intervals.

Environment Agency automatic rain gauge site in Devon

This data, provided under Open Government Licence is now routinely uploaded to WOW as it becomes available on the API. It is displayed in hourly accumulations on the WOW map. The rainfall data can be visualised by specifying the time and date of interest, selecting the ‘hourly rainfall’ layer on WOW, and ensuring that the ‘EA Rainfall Sites’ filter is selected.  

                   

If any rainfall has been reported in the specified hour, then it will be displayed on the map.

By selecting an individual site from the map, more detail can be seen, with the hourly total separated into 15-minute accumulations.

The data can be analysed further in a tabular view by selecting ‘view’ or ‘view full observation’. Please note that there are three rainfall parameters available in WOW, see below for their definitions. It is the ‘Rainfall (mm)’ parameter that is used for this particular data set.

Rainfall (mm) - Accumulated rainfall since the last observation. In the case of this Environment Agency data this is a 15-minute accumulation.

Rainfall Amount (mm) - Rainfall accumulated in a 24-hour period, this parameter is provided by some automatic weather stations.

Rainfall Rate (mm/hr) - An instantaneous rainfall rate, this parameter is provided by some automatic weather stations.

Hourly rainfall accumulations are used by Meteorologists, and Hydrometeorologists, such as those in the Flood Forecasting Centre (another Environment Agency and Met Office partnership). Rainfall observations on the ground are used in combination with rainfall radar data. Monitoring rainfall is essential to inform future weather and flood forecasts and warnings.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/guides/observations/how-we-measure-rainfall

Since this data set has become available, the number of observations received by WOW has increased significantly from 1.2 million observations per day in September 2022, to 1.35 million observations per day in October 2022. The EA automatic rainfall data accounts for roughly 150,000 of those daily observations. 

                                                                     

Using WOW observations to capture high impact weather events

 Weather observations recorded by the WOW community are extremely valuable to research and development work at the Met Office, particularly for what we call “nowcasting” (0-2 hour forecasting). One application that directly uses your [BC1] WOW observations is our Mesoanalysis system. This system produces a rapidly updating UK-wide picture of current weather variables (such as pressure and temperature). This is useful to forecasters for situational awareness and as a tool to understand how the environment is evolving and where high-impact weather such as thunderstorms and strong winds may be likely to develop.

WOW observations are quality-controlled and bias corrected before being interpolated to produce a best estimate of current weather over the UK. The high volume and density of the network of WOW sites allows us to capture regional weather features more accurately than using conventional weather observations alone. Over the last year the mesoanalysis system has been developed to combine WOW observations with Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) model data. Using model data allows us to extend the domain over the sea and help fill the gaps and give more confidence over regions with sparser observations.

Here we give a recent example where WOW data were found to add value during a high impact event over England last Halloween.

On the morning of 31^st October 2021, a small low pressure system developed along a cold front off the south coast of England, with high wind speeds to the south of the low pressure centre. This so-called ‘mesolow’ made landfall over Dorset around 8am and tracked north-eastwards across England, passing over the North Sea off the Yorkshire coast around 12 noon. It brought with it significant wind damage to trees and property and disruption to the public transport network (Holley et al., 2022).

Although this mesolow was apparent in NWP model output, there was some uncertainty in the intensity and exact positioning of the feature. By making use of WOW observations, the mesoanalysis system was able to produce an accurate representation of both the location of the low pressure centre and the high wind speeds associated with it, as seen in the figure below.

Figure of the wind (arrows) and pressure (contours) fields from the mesoanalysis over Dorset on the morning of 31^st October. This is overlaid by radar data to help show the accurate positioning of this feature.

By using WOW observations forecasters are able to improve their situational awareness of features like the one seen in this example. This information can be used to improve warnings and provide advance notice to areas likely to be impacted. The more observations we have, the better this mesoanalysis system can be, so thank you for continuing to submit your data on WOW!

Holley, D. and members of TORRO (2022), Halloween windstorm and tornadoes in England, 31 October 2021. Weather. 

One Million Observations a Day!

 

This month, WOW has hit a major milestone in that we are now receiving 1 million observations every day from weather enthusiasts around the world!

WOW was launched in June 2011, with support from the Royal Meteorological Society and the Department for Education, for weather observers across the UK and now the world. The main purpose of WOW is to provide a platform for the sharing of current weather observations from all around the globe, regardless of where they come from, what level of detail or the frequency of reports. Now, the observations we receive are playing an even more vital role in forecasting as they are fed into Nowcasting to produce our very short-range forecasts.

These observations come from a range of sources including from our voluntary climate observers, weather enthusiasts with weather stations in their gardens that connect to WOW automatically and those who input their observations manually.

We would like to say a huge thank you to our dedicated users who have helped us to reach this milestone and we hope to continue to grow our user base and daily observation totals as WOW progresses.