I don’t think you need to incentivize people to provide weather data. Just make it easy to set up a station and get a lot of people interested. There are already hobby stations out there and networks for them.
Famously, the British found x was "fewer cobras" and y was "cobra tails", the opposite of x being "the locals bred cobras to get money for cobra tails".
Make a citizen science weather station that's free, it's all fine. Make it paid, someone's going to grab satellite pics and generate from them plausible but not necessarily accurate simulated weather station data for everywhere to get that money.
Trying to do this with humans on a big scale combines the worst of software development in the days of punched cards, working without anyone having given you a formal language spec, and black-hat hackers on the modern internet.
It is very very easy to pick your incentives badly; you only get feedback on a very slow cycle (in the punched card days you might run the program overnight and only find it crashed on line 32 from a typo the next morning, but it's much slower than that in meatspace); and you also need constant fine-tuning as people interested in gaming the system share their methods for doing so.
It doesn’t work as well as they wanted and it has been subject to various exploits over the years from people figuring out how to fake the participation to extract rewards.
>>Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions
From the bitcoin white paper.
>I’m referring to projects like the Helium network, which rewards people for running network nodes
OK, what's the clearance rate for helium?
Visa clears 35,000 a second.
It's the same thing with ad networks, most of the effort goes into verifying that an ad click was legitimate and not a bot. Or that classic story of when the British government tried to eliminate Cobras in India by paying a bounty for every dead cobra, which just led to people breeding more cobras.
Yeah I could see the hobby-drive there
This is primarily for air quality by default, but you can get temperature, humidity, etc as well. For each station, someone paid for the hardware and is sharing the data gratis.
Luckily, they allow you to configure additional arbitrary locations to pump data to. I wrote a little program to drop that data into an InfluxDB database (along with PurpleAir, AirGradient, AirThings, Solar Data, and Iotawatt). The only practical use I’ve found is to look and see “When was the last time we head three days in a row that were so windy?” I suppose I could do fun stuff with Home Assistant too.
Like others have pointed out though, gathering observation data is only part of the problem. Turning current and historical observations into usable and accurate forecasts is a big compute heavy task, and whoever is paying for that compute needs either government funding, which is not easy in the age of DOGE, or to charge for the forecasts.
I have a weather station that collects temp, pressure, wind speed and direction rainfall - and which has wifi and built in capability to send it's data to a bunch of web services. Sadly, it's still in the box it came in because I haven't got around to installing it and the burst of enthusiasm the inspired me to buy it has long since died. (If anyone in Sydney Australia wants it, reply here and we might be able to organise for you to come collect it.)
But I barely understand how shit works when you operate at Google scale.
I wonder how many "Android-ish" devices like maybe in car entertainment systems are out there and reporting all their telemetry data back to Google? I wonder how much "Android" is in vehicles with AndroidAuto, and whether that hardware typically has temperature and pressure sensors like phones do?
If I had, say, a billion cars sending me data that includes temp, location, and possibly some vehicle specific CANBUS type data - I'd guess there could possibly be a signal in there that could reliably report temps and pressures at locations, based on heuristics that identify cars parked outdoors.
Same with phones. At the scale of "every single Android phone on the planet", the left over after "the majority of phone that aren't in a position to accurately measure outdoor temperature" still leaves a huge number of devices. I suspect even something stupidly simple like "What's the p99 low temperature of all the Android temp reports in a suburb?" might be a really good indicator, when "all the Android phones in a suburb" might be 10,000 devices or more?
We're up against the most basic of human nature here.
Do you have any idea if you can plug this thing into a public api to share?
Looks like it can be done with home assistant and then pushed up to collection locations, so I suspect things are pretty open
I can access any other publicly shared Ecowitt station's data.
You could do something that for the same zip/county, aggregates the results based on a certain percentage. You could weight it based on how many times a user is outside this range. (e.g. bad actors)
I just got zigbee working in my house (SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus Gateway). Is there any recommended weather nuts out there that could recommend a weather device (that they like and is cool), just in case someone wants to create a project and is looking for data providers.
https://www.adsbexchange.com/how-it-works/
https://www.flightaware.com/adsb/
They do still claim:
"250,000+ Weather Stations
Weather Underground is a global community of people connecting data from environmental sensors like weather stations and air quality monitors "
I think it's a bit like FlightRadar24 - if you feed them your weather station (or ADBS receiver) data you get some level of free access but with non commercial use restrictions.
I am very impressed by how how much data they provide free of charge.
It’s now Apple’s WeatherKit.
The first 500K calls a month is free with a $99 a year Apple Developer account and there is a standard REST API for none Apple OS’s.
They may be included with your $99/year subscription, but to call them "free" is like saying that the groceries I'm holding are free because I just gave the cashier money.
It's free like riding the monorail at Disney World is free; included in the cost of your entry ticket, and utterly inaccessible to anyone who has not paid.
Highways are mostly funded through gas taxes, and registration fees for EVs. Even foreign tourists buy gasoline, or drive an EV that paid its registration fee.
Also, the Disney World monorail is outside the ticket gates. You can ride it without a ticket.
Source: I live 30 minutes away from Disney and partially moved to Florida when I started working remotely to save money on taxes.
We're not talking about "weather forecasts", we're talking about a specific set of weather forecasts accessed in a particular way.
I have no idea what happens to that data and if it contributes to the report in any way.
At the bottom - report an issue.