WOW is being updated and a new WOW will be launched in the next few weeks

[Weather Observations Website]

WOW (Weather Observations Website) is currently undergoing a complete refresh through the development of the WOW Engine.

The original Weather Observations Website (WOW) was launched in 2011 in partnership with the Department for Education and the Royal Meteorological Society. The technology was built by a third party, and hosted on a cloud platform. At the time, this was an innovative use of technology for Government and received a number of industry awards. The platform has become extremely well used and now contains over 800 million observations from 200 countries around the world. WOW is also the primary operational system within the Met Office Observations Group for climate observers to submit their daily observations to the Met Office. The system is also used by Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands to increase their level of engagement with citizen scientists. All of these partnerships deliver global reach and extend the Met Office brand, alongside bringing in revenue and offsetting the running costs.

WOW Engine is a new and improved system for managing and collecting observations from all sorts of different sources. These will include the citizen scientists and climate observers who have been using WOW for the last few years, as well as allowing us access to observations from new sources. The technology will enable us to capture non-standard observations, for example those provided automatically from moving platforms such as cars, and define new variables that have not been foreseen, allowing us to respond with great agility to changing requirements. The ability of our supercomputer to accurately forecast the weather is built on the bedrock of high quality, information-rich global observations along with the ability to understand the impacts of the resulting weather. Our partners in civil contingencies and the Natural Hazard Partnership are increasingly seeking to quantify the impacts of severe weather on infrastructure and people. The ability of the next generation of WOW to capture this ground truth through photographs, video and social media will be a powerful tool to enable us to do this.

The infrastructure will enable the easy addition of new collaborators and data types, and will also open up access to well-documented and well-managed ‘plug and play’ application programming interfaces (APIs), enabling collaborators to make maximum use of the WOW Engine capability. It will also deliver a ‘white label’ WOW template which will be made available for other NMSs wanting to quickly achieve a similar capability to manage third party observations.

The new website is a like for like from the current WOW but with better functionality.

 

For when we go live all your previous site data, user details and site details will be automatically loaded.

 

New functionality we have loaded is the Awards and Statistic Tabs.  So when we go live you will be able to see what awards you have achieved, i.e Gold Award for being a member of WOW and reporting for over 3 years etc.  We will also have awards for most liked photo etc.

 

We are also implementing some basic Quality Control onto the data that is coming into WOW so for example if your temperature sensor starts reporting 10degrees higher than the nearest sites we will be able to inform you of this.

 

The Weather Impact Form is separate from the Observations form now to make it more clearer and can upload photos and videos on both forms as well.