KDE-Forum.org

Hello.

Back in December 2006/January 2007, I sent a bug report to Debian with pretty much all the weather stations that I could find in Canada. I guess a handful of them were no longer in service, and got deleted. For a while, this data made its way from Debian to my machine in normal upgrades. Yesterday I had the occasion to revisit kweather configuration again, and I see that most of the data I had submitted, is no longer in kweather. I tried looking around your svn for the two files in question (stations.dat and weather_stations.desktop I believe), and I don't see any mention of any changes at about that time for including a whole bunch of Canadian data.

I still have all the original data I submitted to Debian, which includes a few stations that were not in service. Is this data of interest to KDE?

Quoted from "kde-forum33"

i really need help with this term that i have to define for science notes....what are land weather stations used for? and if you can't help me there..could you please tell me somewhere where i can find the definition for it..thanks..

Sorry, I don't have a definition for you. Perhaps look at a web site for some government agency involved in monitoring the weather, such as Environment Canada or the National Weather Service.

One of the projects I was involved in quite a while ago, was concerned with "micro-weather", that being the weather on a small scale, such as a farmer's field. Long before that, my family had a farm very close to the mountains, and it was easy to find situations where one part of a field got almost no rain, and a few hundred yards away a fair amount of rain had fallen. This would be on a seasonal basis, not just one storm. But this micro-weather project was taking place probably 400 miles leeward of the mountains, not 40 miles (where my farm was).

For farming, I would imagine in the not too distant future, every small farmer will have a single weather station on their property, and larger farmers might have several weather stations. It is not too difficult to find weather stations meant to be connected to a computer. They don't measure a lot of variables (temperature and pressure are pretty easy), and they aren't calibrated like an official weather station is. But questionable data is better than no data as far as predicting the weather goes. Some organizations involved in weather prediction, will allow "home stations" to register with them, and they will use the extra data in making their predictions. At the end of the day, it just means a better ability to predict the weather.

I've mentioned farming, but many industries benefit from better weather prediction: forestry and house construction would be a couple. If you are surprised at house construction, consider people tearing the roofing off a house to replace it. You really don't want it to rain when the roof is not protected by either the old roofing or the new roofing. Or for that matter, if strong winds come along, which can make it dangerous for people working on the roof, or working nearby.