Hardly a week goes by without someone tweeting to us something to the effect of:
“I live in Bugtussle Arizona and your observations come from Phoenix. Your twitter account should be labeled Phoenix. FAIL!!!”
To revisit this subject, yet again, our individual Twitter accounts are tied directly to specific warning zones. These zones are established by the National Weather Service, so if your town is Bugtussle we find the correct warning zone from NWS and send you that warning feed. We do the same thing with observations but with one difference; we select the closest observation station to your city.
In America we place a priority on 22 billion dollar fighter jets and not on weather monitoring stations which do not cost 22 billion dollars, so the net result is the NWS does not have the funding to set up observation stations in every town in this country.
With one known exception, virtually all major commercial Internet weather service providers do exactly what we do, they find the nearest observation station to your town and feed it to you. The difference is in how we present this data to you. We do not hide that we obtain the information from NWS, nor do we hide the location of the observation station. A few commercial weather providers do list the actual location of the observation station on their pages, but usually in very tiny print, and located where you are not likely to see it. Many of these commercial weather providers however just outright lie and do not list the actual location that the observations were obtained from.
So you go visit that weather company’s Bugtussle page and it says it’s 93 degrees in Bugtussle and you think you got that data from a weather station in Bugtussle. Well get in your car my friend, and go try and find that weather station. Good luck with that.
We will not lie to you about where our observations come from, and we will do our best to get the closest station possible, because after all, observations are your first line of protection against dangerous weather conditions.
As for that one exception, there is one weather service that will accept observations from anyone that spends $39.00 at Walmart for the deluxe model home weather monitor kit, and then hand types the observations up, and then posts them. Well grandma may have her temperature gauge sitting right next to the dryer vent for all we know, and we decided to stick with the professionals at the National Weather Service.
We decided to be forward and honest about it, and not surprisingly, we get a ton of guff from people that do not have a clue how weather dissemination works on the Internet. People who have been trained in an almost Pavlovian fashion by other weather providers to believe in the equivalent of the Weather Tooth Fairy. Hopefully this post will give us something to point those people to from now on.
—gisher