A little project I’ve been working on for the last few days/months/years has been a Particle Photon based weather station. I have had it reporting to Weather Underground since very early on in the project, but I knew that Weather Underground is pretty selfish about their data - they use it for one thing and one thing only: their own weather forecasting models. That’s fine, but what if you want your weather station in the big leagues?
Enter the Citizen Weather Observer Program, or CWOP. They provide data to MADIS (NOAA) routinely and this data is used as a supplement to their weather forecast models, so if you’re providing accurate data (which we all strive to do), you can be confident that your hard work setting up your station will serve to better the forecast models that NOAA has, if at least by a tiny bit.
All of the websites may look like they are from the mid-90s (they are), but the roots of this program run very deep in Ham Radio, and uses the APRS system to distribute packets of data across the Internet and RF (you only get to use RF if you are a licensed Ham, anyway).
Weather station software and hardware from all sorts of top-tier manufacturers (like Davis) have had, for years, some built-in abilities to report their data to CWOP/APRS.
APRS libraries exist for Arduino, but none that I could find that are specific to the types of data that is sent to CWOP, so I wrote my own to facilitate doing this.
You can find it on GitHub here, and you can visit my own CWOP/findu weather station page here for a working example of this library in action.
Note: This library does not actually collect or calculate weather data from sensors; that’s up to you and your firmware! It just helps in sending it along in the correct format to CWOP.
Let me know if you have any questions or find any bugs!