How it all started – Share weather and the spacial resolution
You might wander what “share weather” stands for. Here is a story about the beginning of “shareweather” and what triggered the work and research on shareweather, namely the problem of spatial resolution within meteorology.
It all begun just before the real rise of social media back in 2006. I myself, the founder of ShareWeather, was applying for funding for my research work, at the time mainly focusing on weather forecasting and creating algorithms that could improve the local weather forecasts, my area of interest being road condition forecasting. I was struggling with the limitations in numerical weather prediction models (so-called NWP), in particular regarding their spatial resolution. Basically, the spatial resolution refers to the number of points in space, that is, the number of points allover the globe, for which these NWPs are calculating the weather. Or, more correctly, the spacial resolution is a number describing how densely these points are distributed over the Earth’s surface. Because it is simply impossible to cover all points on the Earth’s surface, NWPs provide a weather forecast for a set of chosen points. The distance between those points is 10-40 km, or 5-20 miles. In other words, not very dense, hardly reliable, and sometimes extremely inconvenient! Just imagine a mountain peak and the problem appears rather clear and the solution unreachable. Anyhow, I had just taken note that the Internet was about to explode in terms of information bursting out from all corners of the digitized world as ordinary people started exchanging increasing volumes of information with others. Until then, the Internet had solely been used for publication of different materials and for people, most of the time two individuals at a time, communicating over e-mail. Now, this fact was about to change forever as new social media platforms were popping up with thousands of people joining every day. We were standing before a revolution of some kind.
You probably already have a pretty good idea regarding the meaning of the words “share” and “weather” and I’ll assure you it’s a good start as you are about to comprehend the meaning of the “share weather” concept and enter the fascinating world of weather and ShareWeather.
I remembered the many useful weather reports and real-time weather observations I had received from different individuals and professionals through my career working as a meteorologist during the 90’s until the present day. I received weather reports from pilots flying aircrafts through the lowest cloud layer and how accurately they were able to tell us meteorologists at what height level (or flight level as aviation specialists call it) the actual cloud base started at a particular time. Talking about useful input! The numerical models spitted out their forecast as usual and they would sometimes not only give us the wrong numbers, but completely miss out that there were clouds on the sky this morning.
Because machines and models are just our creations. Machines and models are not as skilled as people for performance of some tasks. In some respect, a human eye is much of a better instrument than any computer.
Another example on how people were sharing weather information were all the interesting telephone calls one could receive working as a meteorologist. Late in the evening some troubled old cute lady or gentleman would report what they had identified on the nightsky. A road administrator would provide feed-back on the ice and frost forecasts they had received, confirming the accuracy of the predictions or giving new input that could be used for the next forecast round during the coming hours.
Thinking of all these examples it was clear to me that the power of individuals sharing weather information should not be underestimated. It is immense. And sharing weather information was something that could become extremely useful. I added a couple of lines on the subject to my research application and hoped that someone out there scrutinizing my proposal would realize its value and real potential.
Thankfully, six months later I was about to start my research on “share weather”. Shortly after I registered the domain shareweather.com and I started this journey. About five years later I presented my doctoral thesis on this subject, and ever since I’ve been working on developing the concept of “share weather”, developing services and programming applications aimed to serve the purpose of “share weather”.
