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.
-- mgrant, Apr 29 2004

Wunderground http://www.wundergr...erstation/index.asp
Baked [Worldgineer, Oct 04 2004]

Internet Connectable Weather Station http://www.ambientw...m/lacrtewswupa.html
For [half], looks like $250 is about as low as it gets. [Worldgineer, Oct 04 2004]

I had thought about something similar to create a weather web page for my neighborhood. None of the cheap hardware seems to have the ability to readily communicate with anything other than its own proprietary equipment. I never looked further than that.

I'll have to look in to [World]'s link.
-- half, Apr 29 2004


Looks like the hardware's on sale for 170.00. I guess I should be able to manage the software, if they give out the details of the data stream.

Could rig an RF backfeed in to my TV cable system for my own weather channel.
-- half, Apr 29 2004


Thanks Worldgineer, Wunderground seems to be very close to what I was thinking. So yes, looks like this idea is baked.

As for broadcasting this info over the airwaves, no, I don't think that'd be a good idea. The info from people's personal units is just not of known quality. There's also only so much bandwidth on the air to take up with this sort of stuff.
-- mgrant, Apr 30 2004


[marked–for–deletion] widely known to exist. as per [worldgineer]'s link
-- jonthegeologist, Apr 30 2004


[jonthegeologist] and [mgrant]: I am keeping this idea despite the mfd. That it is widely known to exist is debatable. Seems obscure to me and, besides, there is some nice scenario thinking in the idea.

Quality we try to keep.
-- bristolz, May 16 2004



random, halfbakery