Tweet Weather Observations to the National Weather Service
Now you can submit significant weather observations via Twitter to the National Weather Service.
With this experimental program, the National Weather Service will be searching for Tweets that contain information about severe weather events like flooding, wind damage, hail, a tornado or funnel clouds, freezing rain, snowfall and dense fog.
The National Weather Service is taking advantage of the geotagging capability of Twitter, allowing the NWS to correlate each Tweet to its location when it was sent. They’re hoping this will help enhance and increase timely and accurate online weather reporting and communication between the public and their local weather forecast offices.
The NWS is asking Twitters to enable geotagging on their Twitter and 3rd party applications. Since geotagging is still controversial and not everyone is using it, the NWS is offering suggestions for users to Tweet either way.
With Geotagging on, submit your Tweet like this: #wxreport your significant weather report
Without Geotagging, submit your Tweet report in this format: #wxreport WW your location WW your significant weather report.
Some examples of weather report tweets without geotagging:
Ex. 1: #wxreport WW 1289 W Oakridge Circle, St Louis, MO WW 6.0″ new snow as of 1 pm
Ex. 2: #wxreport WW 44.115, -88.595 WW Hail 3/4 inch in diameter at 4:25 pm
- Here’s some examples, starting with the most accurate:
- Using a latitude and longitude, like this: WW 44.231, -88.485 WW
- An address: WW 2485 S Point Rd, Green Bay, WI 54313 WW
- A street intersection: WW intersection of Holly St and N 4th St, Perry, OK WW
- A city name: WW Ft Lauderdale, FL WW
- A zip code is the least accurate: WW 53221 WW
Your location can be just about anything, but the more specific the better.
Read more about this new program at weather.gov/stormreports
The NWS is working with the following sites to monitor #wxreport Tweets:
Wx411
Twitter search
nearbytweets.com
geochirp.com
Twitterfall
Monday, April 26th, 2010
Written by: Mike
Tags: Geotagging, National Weather Service, NWS, Twitter
eShop: Geotagging National Weather Service NWS Twitter
Comments (0)
