Distributed internet weather stations

Over the last few years, I've been seeing electronic weather stations for your home in the stores. The weather stations typically have a sensor that you mount on the roof which measures wind speed, direction, and air pressure. The sensor is linked (often wirelessly) to a display unit in the home. The display unit tracks trends so the user can see what's happening over time.

My idea is to link these models to a global server on the internet so that as thousands of people hook their units up to the net, the server could create a real time weather map based on the collection of inputs. The national weather services have something like this already. This project would give many many additional datapoints and could (possibly) create a much finer grained surface weather model than exists today.

I liken the idea to the SETI program where users run a program on their computer towards a common goal.

As a side effect of plugging your weather station into your net connection, it would have a tiny web server built in so that you could see the weather (temperature, pressure trends...etc) on your computer rather than having to be infront of the device. (ok no laziness jokes here, this could be useful in many situations for example in an office where many people want to see the weather station at their desk).

Technically, the weather station would by default try to get an ip address via dhcp. Failing that the user would be able to configure the device via a web page.

The user would minimally have to configure their location and altitude which could be obtained from a GPS. More expensive models might come with a built-in GPS.