The best weather related website for Okies is, by far, the Oklahoma Mesonet. I still believe this system to be the world’s biggest instrument for measuring heat (thermometer), covering every county in the state. But it’s actually much more than that.

At each site, the environment is measured by a set of instruments located on or near a 10-meter-tall tower. The measurements are packaged into “observations” every 5 minutes, then the observations are transmitted to a central facility every 15 minutes, 24 hours per day year-round.

The Oklahoma Climatological Survey (OCS) at OU receives the observations, verifies the quality of the data and provides the data to Mesonet customers. It only takes 10 to 20 minutes from the time the measurements are acquired until they become available to the public.

You can pay a lot of money for the customized data packages (pdf) from the Mesonet. Or you can get more data than most people need for free, including interactive software.

The network still has some bugs though.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 21st, 2004 at 6:26 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.