The meeting was held at the National Weather Service Office in Jackson. Our guest speaker was Dr. Jan Dutton, Director of WeatherBug Professional at AWS/WeatherBug.
Meeting Minutes
The Jackson joint chapter of the AMS and NWA met on Tuesday, November 27 at 7 pm, at the National Weather Service office in Jackson. Eighteen people were in attendance. After a short business meeting, NWA chapter president Eric Carpenter introduced the evening’s guest speaker, Dr. Jan Dutton, Director of WeatherBug Professional at AWS/WeatherBug.
Dr. Dutton’s talk was an overview of WeatherBug’s efforts at building a national observation network, and efforts they are making to build coalitions to construct regional and state mesonet systems. He began by giving an outline of WeatherBug’s corporate structure, and then turned to its observation network. WeatherBug currently has approximately 5000 weather stations around the United States routinely reporting data. This data is sent to a world class data center with 800 servers that conduct 3 billion data transactions per day. The NOAA Global Services Division has done quality control studies of national observation data, and found that WeatherBug observation systems were overall reliable with a very small percentage of questionable observations (less than 5%). Under an agreement between WeatherBug and NOAA, the WeatherBug observational data is provided to the National Weather Service every 15 minutes through the NOAA GSD MADIS system.
Another partnership WeatherBug has with NOAA is UrbaNet. UrbaNet was started in 2006 with the NOAA Air Resources Laboratory, and is a project to develop and monitor dense observation networks in 40 major metropolitan areas. WeatherBug is actively participating in regional and state partnerships in developing mesonet systems, and is currently working with stakeholders in Mississippi on strategies to build a statewide Mesonet here.
After a question and answer session with Dr. Dutton, the meeting closed shortly before 9 pm. The next meeting will be held in January 2008.
Dr. Jan Dutton discusses WeatherBug’s efforts to build a national observing network.
For pictures from this meeting, click here.
Central Mississippi Chapter of the NWA and AMS 