NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Weather Station for Mobile Devices

 

You may rely on your mobile device's pre-installed weather app to find out what it's like outside. However, if you like a little more atmospheric info with your morning coffee, you might want to check out the Netatmo weather station.

The app-controlled system comes with two silver cylindrical modules, one for the outdoors that runs on AAA batteries and one for indoors that plugs into the wall. After downloading the app and syncing the station to a Wi-Fi network, you can view the weather and temperature conditions inside and outside your home. This weather station measures everything from humidity to indoor acoustic atmosphere.

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Outside variables like humidity, weather conditions and temperature are measured and use the AQI (air quality indicator) rating system from the U.S. EPA's AIRnow program. That rating measures the kind of pollutants are in the air. The AQI ratings go from 0 to 200, the higher the number the worse the air quality. A color system ranging from green to red -- green being the safest, red being the most hazardous -- is used along with the AQI numbers to make noticing changes in air quality easier.

As far as the modules go, the slim cylinders are made from durable aluminum and are UV-resistant. Despite its strong exterior, it's best to keep the outdoor module in a spot outside where it won't get wet when it rains.

Alerts can be set up to let you know what levels of carbon are in the home, and when is the best time to open up your windows and let fresh air in. This section of the app also gives a monthly summary of weather and temperature conditions, like what minimum and maximum temperatures have been inside and out of your home. The app works along multiple devices, iOS and Android, so that everyone in the family with it installed can check the weather before heading out.

Credit: Netatmo

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Techie Ways To Weather 'Frankenstorm' Sandy

As Hurricane Sandy -- aka Frankenstorm -- winds up to wallop the East Coast, many people are bracing for absolute chaos. With wide-spread blackouts, flooding and wind damage all on the menu, millions of people are being advised to take caution and be vigilant.

Compliments of Fast Company, here are a few ways Sandy has disrupted and prompted the world of tech to help people weather the storm.

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So people can monitor Sandy, Google has created an interactive crisis map, complete with weather updates, evacuation routes and other useful information for those stuck in the storm.

Unfortunately Google had to cancel an event in New York where the company was expected to launch a new 10-inch tablet alongside the Nexus 4 smartphone. Facebook also had to cancel an open engineering day, plus a Gifts event at FAO Schwartz.

However, both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have lifted their online paywalls during the storm so that anyone can use their websites to stay informed. Typically, online digital and print subscribers can view extended online content.

ABC's Johanna Stern put together a useful list of apps that help people stay on top of the storm's developments. The list includes Apple's Dark Sky, a $3.99 app that monitors the storm in HD and gives users minute by minute information. Also on the list are disaster information apps from FEMA and the Red Cross.

Finally, for an arty, filtered perspective of Hurricane Sandy, check out Instacane, as well as MTA's Flicker stream.

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If you're like me -- bunkered down and waiting for the you-know-what to hit the fan -- good luck. If you're out of harms way, feel free to send a care package. 

via Fast Company

Credit: Google Crisis Map

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Accurate Weather Forecast For Your Street

Accurate weather forecasts depend on data collected from weather instruments. Lots of 'em. The more data, the higher-resolution the "picture" of what's going on. But the National Weather Service doesn't have weather instruments on every street. But another place does. Well, almost. 

The Weather Underground has turned to thousands of weather enthusiasts to collect weather data in order to produce forecasts accurate right down to the neighborhood.

The system is called BestForecast, and it's making it easier to account for microclimates that greatly influence local weather in places near oceans, lakes or mountains. Areas such as San Francisco are famous for that, with sunny weather on one side of the bay contrasting with fog in the city itself.

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Weather Underground combines its data from weather enthusiasts with that from the National Weather Service and National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, both of which have thousands of weather stations of their own. According to Weather Underground, that amounts to 16,000 weather stations run by local people in the United States and another 8,000 around the world. That's in addition to the 26,000 stations run by NOAA and the 1,000 stations the NWS runs. NWS also sends up weather balloons and has thousands of volunteers who are trained to provide data as well.

It's not clear how good accurate Weather Underground's forecasts are yet. The website posts its performance for a given locale against the NWS, comparing how they did forecasting the local high temperature. Checking out a few sort-of-random cities (New York, Boston, Madison, Wisc., San Francisco, Punta Gorda, Fla., Miami and El Paso) Weather Underground shows that it's consistently closer by a degree or so.

The temperature forecast isn't the whole story, though. BestForecast's additional data should enable better modeling and longer-range forecasts. But unlike the NWS, which trains volunteers and sets up stations, Weather Underground is relying on data from people who might not have perfectly calibrated equipment or placed their thermometers correctly (if you put it on a hot tar roof, that can mess up readings). While crowdsourcing the data should smooth over those kinds of errors, it still means that a comparison between the NWS and Weather Underground isn't so straightforward.

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One big advantage, though, is the real-time nature of the data Weather Underground gets, which means one can see some interesting pattern. For instance, near my own ZIP code, I noticed that the forecast today was for showers (there aren't any at the moment) and about 40 degrees. But the personal stations in the area show that it's a degree or two cooler than that on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and in Central Park, and that for some reason the station at Hunter College is a full 46 degrees. A quick look at Massachusetts shows a slight temperature variation between downtown Boston and Cambridge, while San Francisco -- relatively thick with such stations -- shows strange patterns of local winds.

If BestForecast proves to be as good as Weather Underground hopes, then at the very least it might mean no longer asking if you need an umbrella in Brooklyn and not in Queens.

Credit: Dimitri Vervitsiotis /Getty Images (top); Weather Underground map of Queens, N.Y. (bottom)

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Tsunami Mapper Applet Shows Potential Coastal Damage

A website called Tsunami Mapper combines elevation information available from Google Maps with a flood-fill algorithm in order to predict how a potential tsunami could affect a coastal area. It's easy to use. Just search for the coastal town or area on the map, set a wave height and heading and then double click on the starting point of the tsunami. A grid overlays the coastal area to show you which areas would be inundated with water.

Photo: Screen grab

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Scour Old Navy Logs for Modern Climate Models

It might be hard to believe, but this page from an old British Royal Navy logbook contains the kind of raw data that climate scientists crave. See the wind, barometric pressure and temperature readings there in the middle of the page? That's exactly the kind of historical data that scientists need to put into their climate modeling software in an effort to get a better grip on what the earth's weather was in the past, why it is the way it is today, and what it might do tomorrow. And now, scientists are asking for your help in unlocking all these potential climate clues.

It's a project called Oldweather.org, and it's a collaboration between Britain's Meteorological Office and the University of Oxford folks behind such other "citizen science" projects as Galaxy Zoo and Moon Zoo. A word of warning: this isn't just a piece of software you download onto your computer. You have to actively go and scour the digitized versions of these old logbooks and record the data online.

Why? Because handwriting recognition software just isn't good enough yet to do it automatically.

Now, why logbooks? Well, they are a treasure trove of information. Every Royal Navy ship was required to keep a daily log, and six times a day -- no matter what was happening -- someone had to note the required weather information. Oxford's Chris Lintott puts it this way: "Every four hours, no matter what else was going on, whether they were in battle, whether they were busy dealing with horrible weather conditions, they would record the temperature, the pressures, and make a note of the weather."

Considering that Royal Navy ships have been doing this for centuries, you can imagine that's a LOT of data. The Old Weather project has started with 280 ships from around the World War I era, but there are logbooks that go back into the 18th and 17th centuries.

Lintott adds that the World War I logs can make for exciting reading. "There are places in the logs where you see, enemy ship sighted, battle engaged and then there’s a pause while they go and read the temperature."

Indeed, naval historians are very interested in this project as well. Gordon Smith, who runs the Naval-history.net website, has already found logbooks for ships on which his grandfather served during the First World War. "To actually find out the day-to-day details of my grandfather's life is just tremendous," he told me.

Of course, it's not all accounts of battles and raging storms.

"Hands cleaning ship," reads one entry above.

More than 300,000 people have signed up to help the Old Weather project already.

(Screenshot: Old Weather)

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Unmanned Plane to Chase Tornadoes

You would think that with all of the gizmos, gadgets and devices tornado chasers have at their disposal, they would know everything there is to know about tornado formation. I mean, come on. They have:

• mobile Doppler radar to derive the wind in three dimensions
• weather sensors mounted to the roof of several cars, creating a network called a mobile mesonet that measure temperature, moisture, air pressure and surface winds 
• tripod-mounted sensors that capture the same data as above, only from a stationary point
• tornado probes
• balloon-borne sensors called mobile soundings that take a vertical profile of temperature, moisture, air pressure and winds

Not to mention all of the still and video cameras.

Yet, with all of this equipment, researchers who study tornadoes are still perplexed as to what ideal conditions spawn tornadoes and what combination of weather conditions and wind produce the strongest or longest-lived events.

So for the first time they're adding one more tool to the trade: an unmanned aircraft, which will directly measure temperature and moisture between 500 feet and 3,000 feet above the ground.

The aircraft and the other instruments are part of a 100-plus-researcher project called VORTEX2, which will be traveling through tornado alley from May 1 through the end of June to answer some basic questions. Namely:

• How, when and why do tornadoes form?
• Why are some violent and long lasting, while others are weak and short lived?
• What is the structure of tornadoes?
• How strong are the winds near the ground?
• How exactly do they do damage?
• How can we learn to better forecast tornadoes?

The UA, for short, has a 10-foot wing span and weighs just 20 pounds when it's completely loaded up with its sensors. It travels at about 100 mph and can stay aloft for about an hour before the charge supporting its electric engine runs low. It is controlled manually by a ground-based operator and kept on its flight path using GPS.

It has meteorological sensors that will measure the temperature, winds, air pressure and moisture -- just like most of the other instruments. But because it can be flown into specific areas of the storm, scientists will be able to collect and analyze weather conditions like never before.

That information could be extremely useful for predicting tornadoes, which in 2008 alone killed 174 people, injured 1,711 and cost billions of dollars in property and crop damage, according to NOAA. Currently, tornado warnings are not very accurate, with a 70-percent false-alarm rate, and have just a 13-minute average lead time. By capturing more accurate storm data, scientists can build more accurate tornado models and ultimately produce more precise forecasts and warnings. 

Photos: Tornado: NOAA; UA: VORTEX2/University of Colorado

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