Amateur observers

Later stations:

Met OfficeCitizen science

There are thousands of amateur weather observers based in schools and homes around the UK. Many of these observers share their data with others, including contributing to citizen science projects like the Met Office Weather Observations Website (WOW).

To understand better the activity of amateur weather observers, we interviewed two amateur observers. Edward Hanna [AWS_01] is a Professor of Climate Change at the University of Sheffield and is a serious amateur observer with a semi-professional weather station. The other observer is a hobbyist who had built a home-made kit using a Raspberry Pi [AWS_02]. See the Archive sources section below for links to the interview recordings.

Over summer 2014, we also worked with a University of Sheffield student, Romilly Close, to build our own simple weather station using a Raspberry Pi. It sits on top of the Information School at the University of Sheffield and every 15 minutes we share temperature and pressure observations with the Met Office WOW project. Romilly wrote a guide to building a Pi weather station – if you are interested in having a go and becoming an amateur observer, you can learn how!

Read through the ‘Data journey’ and ‘Culture’ pages to find out more.

Once you have finished go to the next station: Met Office. There you can find out more about the Met Office’s Weather Observations Website (WOW).

Remember, we have a guide to building your own simple weather station if you are interested in becoming an amateur observer.

Archive sources

Reflection

We’d like you to take a minute to reflect on some of the things you have read in this section.

Some questions to get you started:

  • What are your thoughts on weather observation as a hobby – is it something you are interested in exploring?

  • How would you feel about sharing the data you created? Would you be interested to know how that data was used by others?

  • What would you want your data to be used for? Is there anything you would be unhappy about your data being used for?