Cumulus Support

Unfortunately I can't: as an app it's not available in the Netherlands.
Is this one the same?

@phil23, @hill, @sjmcinness, @gti138, griffo42:
I saw this prediction today:


and checked your sites. That was quite a discovery: none of you had any rain in the pwsFWI prediction and none of you received any rain (so that's good from a prediction point of view, bad from a fire quenching point of view).

Except for Crafers: 661 mm (in one day!). Is that true or is it instrumentation failure?
Note that the three Adelaide stations are roughly only 20 km distance from each other.

So the Adelaide sites had a prediction conform the BoM (no rain) yet Crafers failed that prediction hugely.
Inverell in NSW had a BoM prediction of roughly up to 50 mm but that prediction failed as well completely.

As I communicated recently with Phil23 - looking at Australia these days is becoming more and more confusing (and political). This BoM prediction does not really help. However, I would like to point out to @griffo42 above, that if ever there was an argument for local stations and predictions and against relying solely on BoM large picture, this situation definitely is one. Or do I miss a point?

I've been watching the January pattern very closely.

To date the BOM has 27.4mm & I've had 23.0.
BOM's station is about 4km West & 80m higher.

What is more interesting though is the Radar images, which show huge rainfall coming, but splitting over us.
That's not un-common & has happened for years.

Radar Loop

What my feeling is that the split is tracking up the MacIntyre Valley towards the divide.
This is all very reminiscent of conditions back in January 1991 when we had a major flood.

The Weatherzone doesn't carry figures of 1991, only back to 1996, but they are on the BOM & we had 184mm that month.
But it's rainfall in the upper reaches; East to about Glencoe, that feed our local river.

Ah, yes, I made an error because the BoM prediction is the total for a whole week. And that seems to become realised.

Nevertheless, the stations around Adelaide have some surprising numbers (Crafers since the 13th) and a failing system (Surrey Downs since the 11th).
This way it has little use to show pwsFWI.

Anyway the fire danger seems to be disappearing a bit with all the water pouring down now.
The risk now appearing is the flood risk in burnt areas because of increased run-off as the soil has closed and there is no vegetation left.

HansR wrote: ↑Mon 13 Jan 2020 6:31 pmHowever, I would like to point out to @griffo42 above, that if ever there was an argument for local stations and predictions and against relying solely on BoM large picture, this situation definitely is one. Or do I miss a point?

It's interesting,

as the BOM already has my data.
I set my station to upload to the UK's Met Office WOW a few years back.
At the time I did read that the BOM did obtain Australian PWS data from them to do "Whatever"....
There was nothing precise mentioned back then other than obtaining & processing.
Filtering & correcting was also mentioned in relation to badly sited stations.

So this morning, in response to your post, I did a quick search which revealed this...…

http://www.bom.gov.au/wow-support/

&

Phil's Backyard


Interesting As at my 8:00am update, their site is still only showing the 6:50am upload.

@phil: I don't think they - the BoM or any participating meteo service - actually do something with the Wow stations. As far as I can see it is just there. Maybe some data experimenting but nothing serious l ever read about.

Phil23 wrote: ↑Mon 13 Jan 2020 8:10 pm I've been watching the January pattern very closely.

To date the BOM has 27.4mm & I've had 23.0.
BOM's station is about 4km West & 80m higher.

Have now had 25mm today, bringing my January total to 66mm; the BOM is showing 44mm, but that will exclude todays rain, which they measure at 17.4.

They could do with a software update.... their 10 minute updates are on-line about 25 minutes after they are logged.
Think my Cumulus updates about 2 seconds after the update with my 40mbps upload rate.

Phil.

Edit:-

One of our nearby dams is up almost 50mm in the past 48 hours.
Currently sitting 5.8%; 524.61m ASL. At full capacity it is 572m ASL.

Maximum capacity is 1.36 million Mega litres; Surface area of 4,600 hectares & a catchment area of 5,360 km².


Cheers

Phil.

Phil23 wrote: ↑Fri 17 Jan 2020 10:15 am They could do with a software update.... their 10 minute updates are on-line about 25 minutes after they are logged.
Think my Cumulus updates about 2 seconds after the update with my 40mbps upload rate.

Or with a faster computer system

Anyway, there is some water, some relief. It must feel a bit better.
Some more days with water coming up and a higher RH. Both at least will down the FWI.

The strange - and not so good - thing is, that you are supposed to get most rain in summer around this time but you're not even half way.
Large lake btw but at 5% it can use a bit more water

HansR wrote: ↑Wed 15 Jan 2020 9:28 pm @phil: I don't think they - the BoM or any participating meteo service - actually do something with the Wow stations. As far as I can see it is just there. Maybe some data experimenting but nothing serious l ever read about.

Wow - that's a bit of a generalisation! The UK Met Office make active use of WOW data - both in real time forecasting/nowcasting during weather events, and assimilation of selected parameters into forecasting models (after careful quality control, of course).

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/le ... r-stations

Do you think that a weather service would make that size of investment without wanting some return on it?

freddie wrote: ↑Fri 17 Jan 2020 4:04 pm Wow - that's a bit of a generalisation! The UK Met Office make active use of WOW data - both in real time forecasting/nowcasting during weather events, and assimilation of selected parameters into forecasting models (after careful quality control, of course).

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/le ... r-stations

Do you think that a weather service would make that size of investment without wanting some return on it?

OK, sorry, probably was a bit too much jumping to conclusion apparently. The Met Office as originator of the system may actually sometimes use that data, but I can't really find an example. Do you have results where PWSs are mentioned as source? And is that structural?

Anyway, I don't see a real explanation, impact or result - a notification something is a result of PWS. And the Dutch KNMI, as far as I can see, does not do anything with it. They present the data and tell me I can compare, but I need to be a facebook member to get more. That is something I am not prepared to do and if I look there, it does not really present me with astonishing (Wow) results.

So, you may be right in the tapping me on the fingers that I generalised too much, but on the other hand I can't really find proof of a Wow based analysis.
And it probably differs a lot in the participating countries.

It may even be that the predictive models like ECMWF or others (see e.g. yourweather.co.uk which I use in pwsFWI) make use for their prediction of the WOW stations. But I cannot find the references. Can be me. Do you have something?

And btw: the investment is not really very big is it? Looking at the hardware required to make the meteorological predictions, I assume the little bandwidth and programming effort required for WOW is really a drop in the ocean. Some PC based Linux servers (on written off hardware? ... see Phils remark about speed) and some software. They have tons of software engineers there. When finished it does not really take a man-year to maintain. So, investment: minimal [certainly in terms of meteo budgeting]. There may be a lot of data involved, but the data acquisition process does not look very complex to me so I don't see a big investment behind it.

So, in summary, no I can't claim nothing is done with the WOW data, sorry for my message, but on the other hand, WOW results are pretty invisible to me.

1 minute on Google gave me this link that involves your home country: https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/d ... 2/met.1814

You are unlikely to find a structured product based solely on WOW data. The "results" you seek are far more subtle - as WOW will only ever be a component of that weather forecast or study into local conditions or assimilated data set. WOW data is plentiful but of low quality compared to official sites - but is very very useful due to its plentifulness.

Regarding investment - this is public money that is being spent, so you _always_ look for at least some return on that investment, otherwise you are wasting the money of tax payers. True it is on a different scale to the supercomputer, but it is still public money.

freddie wrote: ↑Fri 17 Jan 2020 5:44 pm 1 minute on Google gave me this link that involves your home country: https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/d ... 2/met.1814

OK, fair enough, I withdraw my comments on Wow completely

Nevertheless I think:

1) Results could be made more readily available/visible for the WOW participants
2) The study you refer to is apparently actually a meta study on the validity/correction of temperature measurements from WOW. That in itself is not really a use of the data, it is a scientific validation of the data. But OK, you made your point.

freddie wrote: ↑Fri 17 Jan 2020 5:44 pm Regarding investment - this is public money that is being spent, so you _always_ look for at least some return on that investment, otherwise you are wasting the money of tax payers. True it is on a different scale to the supercomputer, but it is still public money.

We both made our points here, I am not really prepared to go into a real discussion on public spending, especially not with somebody from a country which is in the BRexit process of which more than 50% of the population is against. I did it sorry (and talking about sounding the Big Ben for half a million per 'Dong').

But to put it short, Wow can also be seen as a gift to the meteo enthusiasts who paid for the Met service through taxes anyway, so the gift is their return of investment. A motivational act.

Note that the fire season in Australia has almost ended and the pwsFWI has performed very well. Status and local variation to the general warning worked out well as far as I could estimate from the four test sites over there (of which three close to Adelaide).

Now that the seasons are turning, we are heading for the fire season in Europe. A station close to Murcia has a semi-arid climate and the indications are already that it's heating up (I do not know how much forest there is near by, probably less than with the stations in Australia).

The stations under the influence of the Atlantic will probably see no serious threats, although heat is creeping northbound over the years, so it is especially in those areas that regular inspection of the status is interesting. North of Paris I don't see any real danger but you never know (even in the Netherlands there have been some fires over the past years). In case of dry summers, the Polish test station could become interesting because it is in a forested area.

Check the test stations yourself.

At the end of the fire season in the Northern hemisphere, I'll close the test phase of pwsFWI.
So far I conclude it does precisely what is was designed to do: it gives a good status of the Fire Weather, even beyond my own expectation.

HansR wrote: ↑Thu 12 Mar 2020 8:04 am Note that the fire season in Australia has almost ended and the pwsFWI has performed very well. Status and local variation to the general warning worked out well as far as I could estimate from the four test sites over there (of which three close to Adelaide).

Now that the seasons are turning, we are heading for the fire season in Europe. A station close to Murcia has a semi-arid climate and the indications are already that it's heating up (I do not know how much forest there is near by, probably less than with the stations in Australia).

The stations under the influence of the Atlantic will probably see no serious threats, although heat is creeping northbound over the years, so it is especially in those areas that regular inspection of the status is interesting. North of Paris I don't see any real danger but you never know (even in the Netherlands there have been some fires over the past years). In case of dry summers, the Polish test station could become interesting because it is in a forested area.

Check the test stations yourself.

At the end of the fire season in the Northern hemisphere, I'll close the test phase of pwsFWI.
So far I conclude it does precisely what is was designed to do: it gives a good status of the Fire Weather, even beyond my own expectation.

"A picture is worth a thousand words": photos of the mountain area that are less than 5km from my station (close to Murcia). All the photos I've taken from Wikipedia:





I understand almost nothing of botany, so, to you to judge.

meteosangonera wrote: ↑Fri 13 Mar 2020 6:21 pm I understand almost nothing of botany, so, to you to judge.

Indeed, a photo says it all.
I know a bit so with some forestry background I'll give it a shot.

I see mostly Pine forest (most likely Pinus Nigra, Black Pine, from what I estimate on Photo 4). Photo 4 also shows a very young forest with hardly any undergrowth, probably a plantation. No undergrowth is relevant in fire protection against propagation of fire.
It seems to be a heavily eroded area where forests are necessary to protect the soil. Photo 2 shows barren slopes which might be old burn areas as forest probably has existed there.
Photo 1 shows a garrigue like vegetation, very sparse in front, more dense further away. This is a lovely vegetation society with a huge amount of aromatic plants and flowers. But because of the aromatic plants there is a lot of oil in the vegetation and it burns well. Too well, especially with wind.

The white flower spikes you see is Asphodel (family of Onionweed). It is a lilly and the bulbs are eatable.
All in all a lovely area, probably full of botanic surprises and definitely easy burning.

Thanks for the photos, hope the summer won't be too dry without a lot of fires