Wanted: NOAA's Citizen Weather Observers

David Helms

The editorial by Forrest M. Mims III in the 30 July 2004 of The Citizen Scientist was titled Wanted: Citizen Weather Observers. In his editorial, Forrest described the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Weather Service's (NWS) Cooperative Weather Observer Program (COOP), in which there are about 200 opportunities per year for new volunteers to participate. Fact is, NOAA offers a wide variety of opportunities for volunteers of all stripes to help safeguard the nation against natural and man-made disasters. Indeed, the National Weather Service, and its heritage organization, the Weather Bureau, have advocated for citizen participation in making and archiving weather observations for over 100 years. The COOP Program is one three major volunteer groups supporting the NWS. These volunteer programs to be described in this paper are the COOP, SkyWarn Spotter, and the Citizen Weather Observer Programs (CWOP).

COOP Network

As referenced in Forrest's editorial, the first “Wanted” article, the COOP Program includes about 11,000 stations where the NWS installs a government furnished maximum/minimum temperature sensor and a rain gauge on a participating home owner's property (see example of sensors). Until recently, COOP weather reports were hand written on forms and sent via U.S. mail to NOAA; more recently, web-based and touch-tone data entry options are helping to modernize data collection (Shein 2007). Modernization of the COOP Program has been a priority for many years, as noted in a National Research Council report (NRC 1998). Most recently, the component of the COOP Program that is highest value to climatologists, the Historic Climate Network (HCN) which are the 1,000 COOP stations which have a period of record for 60 years or greater, have been given priority to be upgraded as funds are available. Once modernized, these stations will be called Historic Climate Network Modernized (HCN-M). Roger Pielke, Sr., has co-authored papers on COOP (Davey 2006) and maintains an active blog on the issues associated with modernization of the COOP Program, which is an excellent source of information for readers of The Citizen Scientist.

While opportunities to become a NWS COOP participant are limited, those interested should see this web page for a discussion of the requirements for becoming a COOP observer. More information on data processing of COOP data records by the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) is located here.

Skywarn Spotter Network

In addition to the COOP network, NOAA has two other networks that almost all citizen scientists are welcome to join. The first is the SkyWarn “Spotter” Program, the primary source for most validated tornado, funnel cloud, hail stone, and snowfall reports that the NWS receives. Since its formal inception, NOAA has trained about 230,000 SkyWarn spotters. More factoids on SkyWarn (Doswell 1999) include:

• Storm spotters were first used during World War II to alert the military artillery plants of approaching lightning (now these were motivated spotters!).
• After the Udall, Kansas, tornado killed 80 people on 25 May 1955 tornado, the NWS decided to train their own severe weather spotters (see Fig, 1 for first spotter guide).
• The first spotter training course was held on 8 March 8 1959 in Wellington, Kansas. 225 official weather spotters were trained and certified.
• The birth of today's SkyWarn Program was bolstered by the Palm Sunday Tornado of 1965, which killed 260 people (see Fig. 3 for SkyWarn logo).

Figure 1.Severe Storm Reporting Handbook (1956).

Figure 2. SkyWarn logo.

Figure 3. Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP) logo.

You might suppose that with the advent of the NexRad era in the early 1990's, the need for a SkyWarn Program would be diminished. While the NexRad Doppler winds will show rotation within a thunderstorm, it is not always definitive that a tornado is on the ground for a variety of reasons, including an incomplete view of the sky due to radar beam blockage (e.g., mountains), the radar cone and umbrella of silence, and storms forming between updates (5-6 minutes) or storms moving too fast. It is not an understatement to say that without a robust SkyWarn Program, NOAA's ability to track lead time and false alarm performance for most warnings would be significantly compromised. In a testament to the SkyWarn program, Dennis McCarthy documented how NexRad and Skywarn Spotters contributed to the issuance of 70 tornado warnings during the 3 May 1999 tornado outbreak (2001).

SkyWarn spotters are usually not storm chasers like those seen on the Discovery Channel. In most cases, SkyWarn spotters are at their home or office when they see and report severe weather (e.g. Storm Reports). Generally, no special equipment is needed to become a spotter. However, if reporting snow depth and snowfall, it is good to have a snow board and decimal-inch engineering ruler.

Each of the 122 NWS Weather Forecast Offices (WFO) certifies about 500 SkyWarn spotters every year as part of its public outreach mission. Within each WFO, the Warning Coordination Meteorologist (WCM) organizes and conducts several two-hour training seminars at various locations, including Emergency Management Agency facilities through the WFO's County Warning Area (CWA). Please check you local WFO web page to see when and where the next seminar will be conducted. Sign up early as seats can be limited. The WCM contacts in your area can be found here.

CWOP Network

While SkyWarn spotters are the NWS eyes for severe weather nowcasting (it is a cruel trick that meteorologists work in windowless buildings), it is the Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP) that provide automated routine reports that help predict severe weather. Unlike COOP and SkyWarn Programs, CWOP did not start within NOAA, but within the ham radio community. There are about 750,000 Ham Report members, across the nation, including a large pool of talented computer and electronics engineers to tap into. It was this talent that first established a protocol (APRS®) and infrastructure to send digital messages wirelessly between ham radio stations in 1993. By 1998, the generic capability to send data was enhanced to include weather reports through wireless and Internet protocols; this system was called APRSWXNET and eventually CWOP. NOAA began its participation in CWOP/APRSWXNET in 2000 when it started accepting near real-time reports from a few hundred stations in 2000. By early 2001, the first commercial data logging application was written to accept binary stream from weather stations and format these data into APRSWXNET messages. Over time, about 40 different hardware and software vendors would support CWOP data collection; a basis of support that has enabled CWOP to grow to its current size of 5,000 routinely reporting stations (Figs. 4 and 5). A detailed list of the key milestones in CWOP history is provided in Appendix 1.

Figure 4. CWOP stations in the contiguous United States (5 March 2009).

Figure 5. CWOP stations reporting for the entire world (5 March 2009).

CWOP is a non-profit private-public partnership with three main goals: 1) to collect weather data contributed by citizens; 2) to make these data available for weather services and homeland security; and 3) to provide feedback to the data contributors so that they have the tools to check and improve their data quality.

Weather data are sent from private, automated weather stations to CWOP by internet and internet-wireless through the APRS-IS network to the findu.com server. Every 15 minutes, the data are sent from the findu.com server to the NOAA Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS) program to become part of the NOAA mesonet data set. The data are checked for quality and then redistributed to users. CWOP observations are delivered to over 400 different organizations including universities and state and federal government agencies. The CWOP data flow is shown in Fig. 6.

Figure 6. CWOP data flow.

In addition to providing data quality assessment by MADIS, NOAA's role in CWOP is to provide centralized weather station metadata validation. Requirements for joining CWOP include:

•  An Internet connection (cable, DSL, dial-up, etc.) or a wireless digital ham setup.

•  An automated personal weather station that is properly sited. (O.K., trees block my winds, too.)

•  A desire to share your weather reports with NOAA to help improve weather forecasts for your neighborhood.

•  Weather data logging software or an IP network device that can format and send weather messages (VWS, WeatherDisplay, WeatherLink, WeatherView32, etc.).

•  A conviction that watching weather can be a serious hobby.

•  The desire to learn how things fit together.

Here's the web link for joining CWOP: http://www.findu.com/citizenweather/signup.html

And here's the CWOP Home Page: http://www.wxqa.com/

Table 1. Comparison of NOAA'sVolunteer Networks.

Appendix. Key CWOP Milestones

•  1993: APRS introduced by Bob Bruninga; formalizes protocol for wireless data transmission.

•  1997: First APRS Proto-type Server at Miami Museum of Science, client weather station was K4TCV-1 at Mercy Hospital developed by Steve Dimse.

•  Jan 1998: Key West meeting between Russ Chadwick (AP001) and Steve Dimse (AP002) marks the start of APRSWXNET/CWOP.

•  Sep 2000: NOAA MADIS starts accepting data from FINDU with support from Patty Miller and Mike Barth.

•  2000-2001: Dan Awtrey at Dallas Semi-Conductor develops the 1-Wire weather station kits and Will Beals (AP0003) creates T-238 for TAPR.

•  Feb 2001: Brian Hamilton (CW0000) enables the first commercially available weather data logging application, Weather Display, to connection to APRSWXNET/CWOP through the Internet.

•  Apr 2001: Philip Gladstone (CW0003) writes “home brew” code to connect his 1-Wire station to APRSWXNET/CWOP.

•  May 2001: Arne Hendriksen (CW0020) writes code supporting APRSWXNET/CWOP connections for the 1-Wire Weather Station .

•  Jun 2002: Dr. Tim West (CW0521) writes the VWSAPRS helper application to enable Ambient VWS data logging application to connect to APRSWXNET/CWOP.

•  May 2003: Davis WeatherLink v5.2 supports APRSWXNET/CWOP.

•  Aug 2004: Philip Gladstone (CW0003) develops Weather Quality Reporter Suite web pages using MADIS QCMS statistics.

•  Feb 2008: CWOP Servers separated from core APRS-IS, under direction of Gerry Creager, Texas A&M.

References

Davey , C.A. , and R.A. Pielke Sr., 2005: Microclimate exposures of surface-based weather stations - implications for the assessment of long-term temperature trends. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. , Vol. 86( 4), 497–504.

Doswell III, C. A., A.R. Moller, and H.E. Brooks, 1999: Storm Spotting and Public Awareness since the First Tornado Forecasts of 1948 . Weather and Forecasting , 14 (4), 544-557.

McCarthy, D. H., 2002: The Role of Ground-Truth Reports in the Warning Decision-Making Process during the 3 May 1999 Oklahoma Tornado Outbreak . Weather and Forecasting , 17 , 647–649.

NRC, 1998: Future of the National Weather Service Cooperative Observer Network . National Academy Press , Washington , D.C.

Shein, K., T. W. Owen, 2007: A New Paradigm in Near Real-Time Cooperative Data Ingest at NOAA's Climate Data Center . 14th Symposium on Meteorological Observation and Instrumentation, San Antonio, Texas, Amer Met Soc. J3.20.

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The Citizen Scientist (05 June 2009).