Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Meteorology

This is the talk page of WikiProject Meteorology and Weather Events, an attempt to standardize and improve all articles related to weather or meteorology. You can help! Visit the project page or discuss an article here.

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Atmospheric temperature

I am a bit surprised at seeing that there is not a generic page about the atmospheric temperature, I think it could be very useful. There are many atmospheric pages, including an atmospheric pressure. --Txebixev (talk) 15:09, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure exactly what would be covered under this proposed article. Atmospheric pressure and its gradients have many consequences specific to meteorology outside of the generic definition of pressure, while temperature mostly has the same consequences in the atmosphere as it does in any other branch of physics. If you have any ideas I'd like to hear them. -RunningOnBrains^(talk) 16:45, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

First I must say that I am not an expert on meteorology, neither I am involved in this project. I think that some general information about the atmospheric temperature would be interesting: which is the mean atmospheric temperature, how it varies according to the places (coldest and hottest) and along the time (temperature oscillations), maybe also along long periods of time (ice ages, global warming), how it decreases with height, maybe how it depends on other factors (wind? volcanos?), etc. The page could be not much long, and link to more specialized pages about the before mentioned topics, and others as for instance weather station and so on. Also it could include some of the nice graphics that are in the temperature page. --Txebixev (talk) 14:43, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

I have started a short stub, and have a generalized layout in mind for the article. Please feel free to collaborate. ~AH1 ^(discuss!) 23:56, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for starting the page. I have put some categories into it. --Txebixev (talk) 15:34, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

Article: Climate oscillation

Hi. I don't know why I forgot to post this for review/discussion, but here is a recently-created article encompassing all climate oscillations (ENSO, AMO, etc.) Please have a look at the article, and improve it as needed. Any assessments or article layout suggestions would be welcome. Thanks. ~AH1 ^(discuss!) 15:12, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

FAC

Just a heads up, the 1991 Perfect Storm, one of the more significant New England nor'easters, is on FAC right now - Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/1991 Perfect Storm/archive1. --♫ Hurricanehink (talk) 22:20, 17 September 2011 (UTC)

Jacobs Creek Flood

I just discovered this article. It hadn't been placed in the project yet, and it doesn't appear to have been touched by any of the meteorology folk, so I just thought I'd mention it here in case anyone wants to have a look. Ks0stm ^{(T•C•G•E)} 04:36, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and done the assessment as a law importance start class. Inks.LWC (talk) 05:40, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

Suggestion: Plain-English explanations?

The detailed accuracy of Wikipedia articles is great but if, like me, you came to the page (in my case the one on Arctic Oscillation) to find out what the terms means, in 'educated layman' terms, that detail can be an obstacle. Particularly in an area like meteorology, which is so specialised. Maybe each article could begin with a single paragraph non-technical explaiantion of the content? Then I could learn what I need to know and the experts, for whom the current content is doubtless of great benefit, could continue to enjoy the rest of the detail. Burgh House (talk) 12:23, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Upcoming nor'easter article

User:Hurricanehink/2011 - here is the basic outline for the upcoming unusual nor'easter/blizzard. --♫ Hurricanehink (talk) 02:23, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

I'll hopefully be able to add to the meteorological aspect of the storm after the weekend if an article gets put up, but unfortunately my work schedule for the weekend has me working 16-hour days, so I won't get to anything until Monday. Inks.LWC (talk) 05:20, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

Cool! I don't really have any idea what I'm doing here. Just look at my user name :P So when should such an article be published? --♫ Hurricanehink (talk) 15:27, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

Alright, I published it here - 2011 Halloween nor'easter. --♫ Hurricanehink (talk) 16:56, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

Updating climate data

Since the NOAA 1981–2010 normals are available, albeit in a crude format, is it necessary that we start updating the stats for every US city?  The Tartanator  21:28, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes. Those are the new climate stats. The old ones no longer are current. Thegreatdr (talk) 20:21, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Cloud formation and climate change

An experienced user has opted to move the old "Nephology" stub to Cloud formation and climate change and hopefully to expand it as a see main from Cloud#Cloud formation and climate change (removed pending development). Please take a look and offer advice / help as he builds the article. Vsmith (talk) 00:42, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Question - Mass Updates of Climate Data

Hello...

I wanted to have a discussion around updating climate data on city level pages. I'm afraid I started on the wrong foot by beginning this prior to discussing with the community. You can follow the thread on my talk page Frisch1-Talk On the advice of admins, I'm taking a step back to see if there is consensus on this topic.

To take a step back, I've been operating Weatherbase with a couple of partners for 13 years. It's a side project, not much different than spending spare time maintaining Wikipedia :-). The initiation pre-dates Wikipedia, as we had to roll our own, so to speak.

We started noticing our users flagging errors that we traced back to transpositions on Wikipedia. Plus occasionally, the citations were a bit off. As I'm sure folks here would correct a misspelling of Wikipedia, we'd correct misspellings of our site.

A couple of weeks ago, we started looking at updating a few thousand pages directly from our database. The parameters we looked at (with some initial missteps as I was learning the Wiki culture, which Tartanator helped with):

-- Identify city level pages with no climate data or no climate box

-- Insert the key information most individuals (our demographic are folks planning vacations for the vast majority of our users, and we have a good solid minority that likes the depth of information in one place) look for: basic temperature and precip data

-- Be respectful that this could be misperceived, and place the citation link at the bottom of the page vs. inline to minimize the perception.

The reason for this: personally, I love Wikipedia and have been using it for years. As this is a side project, frankly it's nice to have your data used by as many people as possible.

In starting this without a general community consensus (vs. asking questions), we hit what probably most of you would predict: -- I was accused of spamming

-- I was accused of doing this to boost my links (since there's a no follow, not much point in that, plus with more than a decade on the web, the site has great organic search)

-- Somewhat surprisingly, I was accused of having shoddy data (see my Talk page for that thread). I want to be clear on the last point that's not the case, as the thread will reflect, and more than happy to provide supporting data. I just ticked someone off, I believe.

So I'm starting over, and not posting anything until I can arrive at some kind of consensus.

I have identified a bit more than 6,800 locations that have no climate data. They are almost entirely secondary and tertiary locations, where Wiki pages exist, but no climate data is present.

To be clear, in all of this, I'm not addressing weather data inserted from Weatherbase prior to two weeks ago. We've been used as a source (without permission, but that's fine) going back to 2007. What I'm looking to do is make sure the data that would go in going forward is accurate, and at least the most logical way we hit on was to put it in ourselves.

BTW, if the consensus (and I still don't know how Wikipedia defines that :-( ) is no, it's a dead issue to me. Folks are welcome to keep using the data if they choose, or not if they don't and I won't try to insert anything. I'm in Wiki's hands.

I'm happy to share the data, provide it to the community, review methodology, go over data sources that feed the site. As The Tartanator pointed out in an earlier post, part of the reason we started doing what we do is the reason he pointed out for the 30-year norms... national met office data is unusable by all but climate scientists. Pulling, joining and normalizing this data (as well as merging with nearby sources, particularly for co-op stations) is a pain if you don't do it regularly, or easy if you've built your own parsers :-). The three partners in Weatherbase (though I'm the nerd) have thousands of hours invested in doing this. Oddly, that seemed to be viewed as a negative by the community, but we'll respect that decision and go on our way if that's the call. We've got these locations (in fact 26,000 locations) cleaned, normalized, in Wiki markup and ready to go.

So, to highlight all the potential negatives in one spot:

-- We run ads on Weatherbase. Servers cost money, and we make sure the hobby site pays for itself

-- We started to do this already, but froze when an admin asked us to hold to gain community consensus.

-- Minor one, but we added &refer=wikipedia in the links. Though our tracking identifies inbound source, it's easier on the content level. More than happy not to do this.

So we're on hold. The data's all there, and ready to be shared.

Please let me know. Thank you.

Frisch1 (talk) 23:38, 27 November 2011 (UTC)Frisch1 (Bill Frischling)

As a fast follow up to my previous post, please feel free to look at an example of the format the NCDC publishes the new 30 year normals as referenced by Tartanator Pago Pago. I certainly have no objection to someone or someones parsing this data to republish and cite on Wikipedia. We've already incorporated this into our datasets, removing single source datapoints that used just the 1971-2000 data, and using this data to update, enhance and improve data (normally first order stations) where we can access the daily records to build this dynamically. This includes filtering through provisional data, etc. etc. Now multiply that out to BoM, JMA, KMA, the centralized WMO, MeteoFrance, SNM (both Mexico and Argentina)... the list goes on.

Then of course there's the naming convention on these stations, oftentimes for locations miles away, or for dams and other "non-friendly" locations that make sense to scientists. We've normalized to closest point using Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and Geonames based on the exact lat/long coordinates. This is already cleaned, organized and filed in a MySQL db with both the raw and normalized/cleaned versions of the data. What I'm looking to do is share it. Open to suggestions. Hoping there will be responses and feedback.

Frisch1 (talk) 01:33, 28 November 2011 (UTC)Frisch1

Technically, climate data for the United States originates from the National Climatic Data Center. If any of the articles use any other source, they could never be improved to Good Article or Featured Article status because NCDC is the original source. However, I can see if climate data for some location is NOT covered by NCDC, that another source could be used since it would be the originator of the data. If your organization does it, great. However, for wikipedia purposes, it needs to be easily found online or in a published form at a library in order to be used...not just pulled out of some private vendor's website that then won't allow people reviewing the articles to check on its authenticity. Thegreatdr (talk) 20:27, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Merge proposal

Hi,

It has been suggested that glaze ice be merged into the freezing rain article since 8th of December 2011. It would be to hear from the communauty about his at Talk:Freezing rain#Merge glaze ice into this article. Pierre cb (talk) 13:44, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Useful photo?

useful photo?

Not sure if this is the right project to ask about this... Do any of you know if the photo at right is useful? It was uploaded without a description but maybe it's some sort of self-evident but interesting phenomenon of atmospheric optics. Thanks for your help! Calliopejen1 (talk) 06:06, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Looks like a small sundog within a halo. Yeah, it could be useful for either article. =) Thegreatdr (talk) 20:17, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

That's the wrong shape to be a sundog. I would guess that the photo is a 22° halo around a nearly full moon, at a time when a planet or airplane happened to be in the right place to coincide with the halo. If so, the coincidence would make it a good photo but too atypical to illustrate an article. Palpable (talk) 06:03, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

APB for the Smithsonian Weather Maps (1848-1870)

I poked around the National Archives about 11 years ago trying to find these wild geese, but like the whole Library of Congress, Archives was overwhelming and although I was able to find memos relating to the Smithsonian Weather Network, I couldn't find any of their surface weather maps. I have messaged a wikipedian who works within Archives, and Archives themselves through their online form in case I overlooked them. Has anyone within the project ever seen them? They do not appear to be covered within the Weather Bureau or NOAA collections at the National Archives and I haven't run across them at the NOAA Central Library either. Out of ideas, and sending out a broad plea for help. Thegreatdr (talk) 20:20, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

here's a link at national archives 27.3 Records of the Smithsonian Meteorological Project 1848-91 Slowking4⇔ †@1₭ 19:27, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

project title/tag

WikiProject Meteorology (WikiProject Meteorology and Weather Events) or meteorology (just meteorology) - for this project as the correct tag - clearly at some stage in the project history someone has changed the tag - so that there are two project names - anyone au fait with the slippage between the two? SatuSuro 02:28, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

The template at the top of this page is not the official "WP:Meteo" template. It can be changed to just say "WikiProject Meteorology". --♫ Hurricanehink (talk) 04:08, 30 January 2012 (UTC)