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The Amount of Climate Data Collected Every Day Is Awesome

Hopefully you caught "Motherboard's post":motherboard.tv last Thursday about James Leng's very cool sculpture/weather data visualization art project, ""Point Cloud":http://vimeo.com/42896836." I was hoping to have a comment in there from the NOAA with...

Hopefully you caught Motherboard’s post last Thursday about James Leng’s very cool sculpture/weather data visualization art project, “Point Cloud.” I was hoping to have a comment in there from the NOAA with some more of the numbers behind the data that the agency, which is responsible for pretty much all weather forecasting in the US, collects and uses to kick out the different weather models that the agency and possibly your local weatherperson translate into smiley suns and frowny clouds. But the NOAA didn’t get back in time because it turns out that it’s not so easy to answer the question of just how many total data collection points the NOAA actually uses. Turns out that the answer is worth its own post.

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First off, here’s what the whole worldwide weather data collection system looks like:

The NOAA uses information from all over the world (of course), which is collected and organized by World Meteorological Society’s Global Telecommunications System. Here’s what the World Meteorological Organization says about the network: “Currently, more than 10,000 manned and automatic surface weather stations, 1,000 upper-air stations, over 7,000 ships, more than 100 moored and 1,000 drifting buoys, hundreds of weather radars and over 3000 specially equipped commercial aircraft measure key parameters of the atmosphere, land and ocean surface every day. The space-based component of the WMO Observing System contains operational polar-orbiting and geostationary satellites and also R&D environmental satellites complementing ground-based global observations.”

So, if you follow your local weather forecast all the way back, you’ll find this fairly insane array of data collection instruments. The National Weather Service’s Susan Buchanan also helped out with a list of tools specific to the US.

A network of more than 5,000 river gauges used in river flood models 530 tide gauges that measure water depth and wind speed and direction Almost 10,000 weather and climate stations monitored by volunteer weather observers who submit data to the National Weather Service 900 automated surface (ground) observing stations (ASOS) 244 upper-air observations per day, collected by launching radiosondes with weather balloons twice a day from each of the 122 weather forecast offices A network of 39 ocean tsunami buoys A network of 162 ocean weather buoys A network of 33 wind profilers A network of Satellites: 2 geostationary, 2 polar-orbiting, and several low earth-orbiting defense meteorological satellites A network of 160 Doppler radars 12 aircraft — fly on weather missions as needed (i.e., to survey winter snow pack and ice jams, fly into hurricanes, gather winter storm data) 19 ships

All that data together (and fed into algorithms) requires supercomputers capable of doing some 69.7 trillion calculations per second. So, yes, it’s a lot. At the same time, I have to think how our weather arsenal — currently doing a whole lot of saving American lives — would compare lined up next to, like, any segment of our military. I suspect that would be a very depressing exercise.

Image: NOAA

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.