Users Help a Weather Site Hone Its Forecasts
By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK
NYT
Kevin Bleier, an amateur meteorologist, lugged a weather station up several precarious ladders to reach the peaked roof on his 40-foot-tall house in Alameda, Calif., then mounted it on a 15-foot pole to capture data for his personal weather site.
But the data is not for Mr. Bleier’s site alone. His station and over 20,000 like it worldwide are part of the largest network of weather stations ever assembled, according to the meteorological Web site Weather Underground.
The network is part of an audacious plan to crowd-source weather measurement and, Weather Underground hopes, to snatch viewers from its larger competitor, the Weather Channel’s Weather.com. In the last six months, Weather Underground has averaged about 14 million unique visitors a month in the United States, while Weather.com attracted about 42 million, according to Quantcast, an online metrics company.
“What’s new right now is we’re taking that data and we’re generating forecasts from those stations,” said Alan Steremberg, president and co-founder of Weather Underground.
(More here.)
NYT
Kevin Bleier, an amateur meteorologist, lugged a weather station up several precarious ladders to reach the peaked roof on his 40-foot-tall house in Alameda, Calif., then mounted it on a 15-foot pole to capture data for his personal weather site.
But the data is not for Mr. Bleier’s site alone. His station and over 20,000 like it worldwide are part of the largest network of weather stations ever assembled, according to the meteorological Web site Weather Underground.
The network is part of an audacious plan to crowd-source weather measurement and, Weather Underground hopes, to snatch viewers from its larger competitor, the Weather Channel’s Weather.com. In the last six months, Weather Underground has averaged about 14 million unique visitors a month in the United States, while Weather.com attracted about 42 million, according to Quantcast, an online metrics company.
“What’s new right now is we’re taking that data and we’re generating forecasts from those stations,” said Alan Steremberg, president and co-founder of Weather Underground.
(More here.)
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