global webcam weather monitor
Another overcast morning. Joy. I’ve had an idea for a distributed weather forecasting / tracking project though. Every cloud…
Basically everyone who has a webcam leaves it on when not being used, and points it out of their window. A small app on their PC then sends a stream of images to a web service which sets the view onto a map.
If the cam is pointing at the sky, or at something outdoors at least, changes in colour, brightness, etc… will indicate local weather conditions.
When a cloud passes over a district, the central server can see the webcams darken in succession. It can then drive a real time view to the website for people in the area. I could see a dark mass approaching from the west, and predict rain arriving shortly.
If it looks like it got dark a mile away, I can look at the nearest webcam to see for myself in more detail. That way I can see if it is cloud, or just a cat sitting on the windowsill blocking the light. If it’s a cloud, I should be able to see if it’s raining, or just overcast.
This is much better than pictures of clouds with raindrops coming out of them and some guy yabbering on about it being ‘mainly clear with some showers’.
The weather map would look like one of those photographs made up of thousands of other photographs. Or it could simply take an aggregate color / brightness value from webcams within the area.
Scale
If the central server is replaced by a swarm of nodes then even better as it could be totally open and distributed. Most people will only be interested in local weather, as this is really a micro weather forecasting system, allowing me to see actual weather near me now. If I’m about to go out for a run, or to cycle to work, this is amazingly useful. The data then doesn’t have to travel too far, other than reporting out broad aggregate values – for plotting on the national maps.
It could also plot the average colour of the webcams across the country – it would be beautiful when it snows. Animations would look amazing. Flash mashups with google maps and time animations as big storms moved over an area could look amazing. Screensavers could be great too – based on live feed info.
You would also be able to see night time approaching as cams get darker – again, animating this could be cool.
A lot of towns and cities have webcams running 24/7 already which could be used to trial this. Even if they point at something complex, so long as it is outdoors it would work, it is the change we are looking for, darkening or lightening for example. We don’t need to actually see the sun or the cloud for this to work. Assuming the project consumes the webcam feed lightly, I can’t see any objection people could have to allowing it to harvest already published images.
It could be operationally similar to open street map, a great project which produces maps in this people generated manner. Some geotagging group should be able to accomodate kicking off something like this, and have a sound tech foundation for it already from other projects.
Thanks for the CC webcam pics to http://flickr.com/photos/konnecke/268895705/ and http://flickr.com/photos/snype451/42070498/
The sketch:
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Steve invents things while travelling to work on the train. He sketches them in his moleskine notebooks. Instead of actually making them (and becoming a billionaire overnight) he posts them here for the good of mankind.
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