Thursday, December 11, 2014
Why don't you do it right?
Spokane gets shitty info from the Weather Bureau. All three of the reliable measuring stations are at airports. Airports are distant from cities, but most importantly airports don't give a fuck about the information that humans need. They only care about changes in visibility. When visibility changes from OVC9 to OVC7, it's time to record a new reading. When visibility doesn't change, we just mindlessly click along once per hour if we feel like it, or we might skip a day or two if we don't feel like it. Wind? Rain? Snow? What are those? Mere frills and furbelows. No need to record them. Nobody needs to know those meaningless little trivia.
Result is a completely asynchronous and non-periodic chart like this. Note the fine-grained but irregular times near the bottom (circled in red) when visibility was changing but nothing else. Note the big changes in wind near the top. Insignificant. No reason to break our cycle to give those mere humans a warning of what's coming.
It doesn't have to be this way! I got curious to see where the advertised Big Storm was hitting California. Looked at the NWS info for San Mateo. Among the airport shit was this BEAUTIFUL record from a ham radio operator near San Mateo.
Every five minutes a new reading, no matter what's happening. You can glance at this list and draw a mental graph without having to stop and think about wildly irregular and syncopated intervals. If you're east of this station, you can tell what's coming in time to prepare for it.
BEAUTIFUL. MAGNIFICENT.
The technology is available to do this. In fact the technology has been around since 18fucking70. Why in the fuck can't we do this?
It doesn't have to be this way! I got curious to see where the advertised Big Storm was hitting California. Looked at the NWS info for San Mateo. Among the airport shit was this BEAUTIFUL record from a ham radio operator near San Mateo.
Every five minutes a new reading, no matter what's happening. You can glance at this list and draw a mental graph without having to stop and think about wildly irregular and syncopated intervals. If you're east of this station, you can tell what's coming in time to prepare for it.
BEAUTIFUL. MAGNIFICENT.
The technology is available to do this. In fact the technology has been around since 18fucking70. Why in the fuck can't we do this?Labels: Metrology
¶ 8:47 AM
