Mobile Mesonet System Blog

Welcome to the first blog post for the Chase Positioning System! I’ll be using this to provide updates and news on the system.

First up, this site is now mobilemesonet.com and is separate from its former home at www.okstorms.com. The idea is to try and make this system a real functioning mesonet, with data provided by mobile users in real time. I think there has been some confusion over the term ‘mobile mesonet’. Weather collection devices on vehicles are referred to by many as mobile mesonets. The thing to remember is that a mesonet is a network of weather observations covering a mesoscale area. For the purpose of this system, we’ll define mesoscale weather phenomena as being from 2 to 200 km in size, and lasting from 3 minutes to 6 hours. A person operating as part of a mesoscale network could call the weather instruments on his/her vehicle as a mobile mesonet station, but operating outside the network it would just be a mobile weather station.

I’m going to set this system up for any storm chaser/spotter to use to send position information, images, automated or manually entered weather data, and storm reports. Any or all of this will be viewable on the mobilemesonet site. I’m also going to set up the ability for a user to embed code in their own web site showing their position, images, etc on their own personal Google Map.

To implement many of these changes, I’m completely re-writing the client software. The original version was written in some very sloppy Visual Basic, and was prone to crashes and memory problems when used. I’m about halfway done with the re-write, this time in C#. The new software seems much more stable, and adds new functions for weather data and storm reporting. I’ll post some screen shots soon showing the progress. For now, the older version is no longer available for download. I’ll post here when the new version is available.