WU Personal Weather Stations Are Now 200,000+ Strong

For more than a decade, individuals across the United States have been collecting weather data from their houses and backyards using personal weather stations (PWSs), and sharing their data with the world via Weather Underground. Data from the WU PWS Network, which was launched in 2001, can be found in a variety of formats on the WU website and WU apps. Over the last several years, the WU PWS Network been growing by leaps and bounds, both in numbers and geographic spread. From around 30,000 stations in 2013, mostly in the United States, the WU PWS Network has now grown to include four continents and 195 nations--and we are delighted to announce that it recently passed a major milestone: 200,000 stations! Not only is this the largest PWS Network on Earth, it is also one of the world’s biggest Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. (IoT refers to groups of interconnected objects that can exchange data.)

Observations from the WU PWS Network are combined with atmospheric data collected from 40 million smartphones monthly (barometric pressure and sky/hazard reports) as well as from 50,000 flights per day, all feeding into WU’s forecast engine. Together, they help improve and refine the hyperlocal forecasts that are a WU hallmark.



More than 100 personal weather stations going to critical locations
The Weather Company, an IBM Business (of which WU is a subsidiary) announced today that WU will partner with meteorological, government, and nonprofit organizations to furnish hundreds of PWSs at key locations in Africa, Asia, and South America. The plan is to leverage the benefits of PWS Networks and IoT technology to help advance local economies, build resilience, and improve forecast technology.

--As part of IBM’s philanthropic Smarter Cities Challenge program, WU will be donating up to 100 PWSs this calendar year for deployment in Santiago, Chile, and Visakhapatnam (Vizag), India. Both cities have at least 5 million residents in their metropolitan areas, and each has its own weather-related issues:

• Santiago: flooding and landslides due to heavy rainfall; potential wildfires during hot, dry, windy weather
• Vizag: heavy monsoon rains each summer, along with the risk of tropical cyclones from the Bay of Bengal

The Smarter Cities Challenge sends teams of top IBM experts for three-week deployments to help cities around the world address their most critical challenges and operate more smartly and effectively. The two cities above were chosen for the PWS deployment in order to maximize the potential benefit as a function of population density, web connectivity, and current infrastructure gaps.

--In partnership with the Oregon-based nonprofit TAHMO (Trans-African HydroMeteorological Observatory), more than 300 PWSs will be deployed across Nigeria, Kenya, and various other African nations where traditional observing networks are sparse and expensive to maintain As these new stations come online, IBM and TWC researchers will assess how much each PWS helps to improve forecast accuracy. In addition, the station data will be incorporated by IBM’s Watson IoT platform for use in precision agriculture (e.g., optimizing the use of water and fertilizer) and other areas. The focus of TAHMO is on building a dense network of hydrometeorological observations across the sparsely-sampled African continent.


Figure 1. Visag, India (top) and Santiago, Chile (bottom). Image credits: Av9/Wikimedia Commons (Visag), Javmoraga/Wikimedia Commons (Santiago).

A win-win-win: local economies, societal resilience, and IoT science
The PWS donations above will provide much-needed data that can serve society in a variety of ways: informing crop growing and harvesting, optimizing critical resource management, providing advance notice of extreme weather, and much more. Local business should benefit as well, through the ability to leverage weather data to improve decision-making support and expand weather-sensitive industries. The donations will also serve as a test bed for exploring the combined power of the PWS Network and Watson IoT technology, which aims to blend cognitive science and interconnected data across a wide spectrum of disciplines.

“The private sector, including companies such as Weather Underground and The Weather Company, has played a useful role in the delivery of weather forecasts,” said Christian Blondin, head of cabinet of the secretary-general and director, external relations, World Meteorological Organization. “We welcome the role of such private sector companies in the provision of selected value-added services in complement of the services provided by national meteorological and hydrometeorological services around the world."

For more details on this initiative, see the press release.

Bob Henson