Calling all Weather Obsessed Gardeners

The Met Office wants weather obsessed gardeners to help them improve their forecasts by installing small weather stations in the garden to predict thunderstorms and tell them when there’s a weather front on the way.

Calling all Weather Obsessed Gardeners

The country’s leading weather forecaster says its supercomputer – among the most technologically advanced in the world and able to carry out 16 trillion calculations a second – needs more data than the Met Office’s 500 weather stations can collect. And that’s where the country’s garden owners come in.

‘It differs from one end of the street to another in terms of how cold it can be, so the core data we get, the better your forecast,’ said Met Office forecaster Simon Partridge. ‘If the UK public can send in data, they can feed the forecast.’

To get involved, you’ll need a miniature weather station, available in electronics shops for about £60. They’re able to sense temperature, humidity, rainfall and pressure and users can upload results to the Met Office’s Weather Observation website (WOW).

Extra data may Help Predict more Extreme Weather

It’s hoped that the extra data will help the Met Office predict more accurately extreme weather like the storms which caused flash floods in south-east England and turned Glastonbury music festival into a mudbath this summer.