Topic: WU no longer displaying MADIS stations?

[d_l]

Has anyone else noticed that WU is no longer displaying MADIS stations on the PWS maps?  I track the PWS stations on WU in a 100 sq mile box around me and I noticed that the MADIS stations disappeared early this week.   

This has been a mixed bag.  Some of the MADIS stations closest to me I considered to be the most accurate of all the WU stations (besides mine of course  ).  On the other hand, the least accurate station out of the 17 or so in the box was a MADIS station and the station closest to mine was mislocated by over 1.5 miles and so was over plotting on my display symbol.

The other bad thing about the MADIS stations is that their data wasn't current.  WU is encouraging the reporting of data in nearly real time with Rapid Fire, but MADIS was reporting their data with an estimated half- to one-hour delay.  So when that data was mixed with current conditions, it caused a confused picture of what was happening, especially if a casual observer didn't know to mentally compensate for the delayed data.

I guess all in all, IMO the loss of the MADIS data is a good thing.

[casa manana]

quite a while ago, I ran into a problem with WU's use of the MADIS stations.  It turns out that since there were a lot of them in my area, and they didn't report very often, my station (rapid fire) would report very different (but correct) temperatures during the early morning periods when the temperature rises rapidly.  At the time WU had a quality control algorithm in place that compared stations measurements to an average of the surrounding stations.  Well, you guessed it, in the situation I just described, it was MY station that got tossed out, even though it was more accurate and timely.  Fortunately when I contacted WU about this, they quickly verified what was going on , and kindly set my station to "good" by default.  They were nice enough to send me the actual output of their algorithm to verify what was happening, which I also appreciated.  I'm not sure that they are applying any of the QC algorithms now...it actually doesn't seem so as I look around the area, bu tI don't know.

Anyway, it was not a huge problem, and it got resolved quickly, but since you brought up the MADIS site topic it reminded me of my little "encounter" with them.

[SlowModem]

Has anyone else noticed that WU is no longer displaying MADIS stations on the PWS maps?  I track the PWS stations on WU in a 100 sq mile box around me and I noticed that the MADIS stations disappeared early this week.

On the page for my area (Ten Mile, TN) there are four MADIS stations listed.    

The other bad thing about the MADIS stations is that their data wasn't current.

One of the MADIS stations is where I work ( Kingston). I've asked the guys that enter the data where it goes and how it gets to WU, but nobody at work knows.  All they do is read the rain gauge at midnight and enter it into a spreadsheet file.  It's a real mystery.  

GregW

[wxtech]

Good riddance.  The Madis sites were frequently just NA (not available) white spots cluttering the map.  Looked like they reported only during daylight hours.

[d_l]

On the page for my area (Ten Mile, TN) there are four MADIS stations listed.   

Yes, I noticed that they are still listed on that page for my area too, but they are not listed on the map: Ten Mile, Tennessee WunderMap