Author Topic: Questions regarding weather underground  (Read 1279 times)

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Offline Torge

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Questions regarding weather underground
« on: February 16, 2022, 07:12:57 AM »
Hey guys, I am currently writing my bachelor thesis on the topic "Comparison of weather data from professional with private weather stations". To obtain the data from the private weather stations I wanted to use Weather Underground and now I have some questions.
1. Is it possible to communicate with the operators of the stations and if so, how can I do that?
2. Is there a more elegant solution to get the data instead of just copying it? I have read that this is possible via an API, but you have to register your own weather station first, which is not possible for me.

Offline joegr

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Re: Questions regarding weather underground
« Reply #1 on: February 17, 2022, 03:01:55 PM »
1.  This board may be your best bet for that.
2. Not as I know of from WU.

Offline havtrail

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Re: Questions regarding weather underground
« Reply #2 on: February 17, 2022, 05:34:33 PM »
It used to be possible to try to contact PWS owners on WU through a "comments" area on the individual WU PWS pages, but they removed that feature. I tried it with a number of stations, but got no responses from any of the station owners. WU was and is not interested in fostering a community of users, so that they can communicate with one another, as far as I can tell.

For this and many other reasons documented in past postings on this forum, many conscientious enthusiast PWS owners have cut their data feed to WU, and stopped any involvement with it.

Rich K.
Onset HOBO RX2102 Cellular
https://www.havtrail.com/weather/
NEWA https://newa.cornell.edu Haverford, PA

Offline WheatonRon

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Re: Questions regarding weather underground
« Reply #3 on: February 17, 2022, 09:10:47 PM »
Torge, what are you trying to accomplish and we will try to help. A little background for you is probably appropriate. Weather Underground is a platform where pws owners like me can upload their station’s data so others can see it and to a certain degree see some historical data of the pws. Over the years, the quality of WU has gone down significantly. Whether this results from new ownership at WU, which is now IBM—-yes, big blue, or what I don’t know. But as a result of such quality decline, many pws owners (myself excluded) have quit sending their data to WU. I have 3 pws that upload to WU despite the quality decline. As far as I know, you can’t use WU to identify owners and send them an email. There’s another way to view pws, and that is the Citizens Weather Observer Program or CWOP. Below is a link to one of my 3 stations and you can compare the data of nearby stations and there is also a link to the owners email if you click on quality control graphs followed by another click on the landing page to “station summary.”  Personally I prefer CWOP for comparison purposes but that is why I ask what you are trying to accomplish. You can also send those who post here a personal message if the content in a thread is of interest to you, and most folks that post here will be happy to help.

CWOP has some oversight by NOAA, the U.S. federal government weather group. Exactly what oversight they provide is somewhat if a mystery to me—they do handle initial registrations and station location updates but beyond that, not completely sure.

http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/wxpage.cgi?call=FW3075





« Last Edit: February 17, 2022, 11:22:55 PM by WheatonRon »
Davis VP2 with SHT31 (3 complete VP2 systems—2 with a daytime fan and 1 that has a 24 hour fan); CWOP--CW5020, FW3075 and FW4350; WU--KILWHEAT17, KILWHEAT36 and KILWHEAT39; WeatherCloud.net; CoCoRaHS--IL-DP-132; and Weatherlink 2.0

Offline weatherdoc

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Re: Questions regarding weather underground
« Reply #4 on: February 18, 2022, 07:26:58 AM »
You should look at NOAA's Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS) here: https://madis.noaa.gov/.

MADIS ingests data from NOAA data sources and non-NOAA providers (including PWS's), decodes the data then encodes all of the observational data into a common format with uniform observational units and time stamps. Quality checks are conducted and the integrated data sets are stored along with a series of flags indicating the results of the various QC checks. MADIS provides several methods for users to access the data to meet their needs. Users can request data from July of 2001, which is when MADIS was first available to the public, to the present.

If you're interested in using MADIS, I can put you in contact with people at NOAA Global Systems Lab that might be willing to help - just send me a personal message.

Offline Torge

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Re: Questions regarding weather underground
« Reply #5 on: February 18, 2022, 05:59:10 PM »
First of all, thank you for your comments and help, but I realized that I have given you too little information, so the following now some.
I myself am from Germany and as I said I am supposed to compare the data from private weather stations with professional weather stations. After I had chosen my 3 locations of professional weather stations, I was looking for 5 stations each in the immediate vicinity. Besides Weather Underground, I visited other platforms such as Netatmo, but found significantly more nearby weather stations on WU, which is why I chose WU. Now I wanted to ask the owners of the stations to give me some information about their devices and locations (height above ground, use of which measuring devices). For those who have registered a weather station with WU, what information did you have to provide when registering? And on the topic of getting the data, I was hoping for an easier way to get the data instead of laboriously copying it day after day.

Offline WheatonRon

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Re: Questions regarding weather underground
« Reply #6 on: February 18, 2022, 08:45:52 PM »
I would try doing a search at CWOP. Click on the below link, pick a location and it will show you stations within that area and who the pws owner is and you can send the owner an email requesting station type, height off ground etc. The pws owner may have an idea how to get station data to you. This search tool isn’t the best, but it hopefully will get you started. Good luck.

http://www.wxqa.com/search.htm

« Last Edit: February 18, 2022, 08:50:15 PM by WheatonRon »
Davis VP2 with SHT31 (3 complete VP2 systems—2 with a daytime fan and 1 that has a 24 hour fan); CWOP--CW5020, FW3075 and FW4350; WU--KILWHEAT17, KILWHEAT36 and KILWHEAT39; WeatherCloud.net; CoCoRaHS--IL-DP-132; and Weatherlink 2.0

Offline jimi

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Re: Questions regarding weather underground
« Reply #7 on: February 18, 2022, 10:07:18 PM »
If your on a wunderground station dashboard, click the i symbol next to the station name. You'll get a popup that gives station info including Latitude / Longitude, elevation and hardware type and software used to upload data

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« Last Edit: February 18, 2022, 10:13:25 PM by jimi »
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