Met Office calls on people to install mini weather stations at home to help forecast

Better forecasts: The Met Office has asked amateur weather watchers to install meteorological stations in their gardens
Daniel Leal-Olivas/PA
Hannah Al-Othman4 July 2016

The Met Office has called on thousands of amateur weather watchers to install miniature meteorological stations in their gardens to help provide better forecasts.

The national weather service has one of the world's most technologically advanced supercomputers that can currently carry out 16,000 trillion calculations a second.

But it is hindered by a lack of data and the Met Office has turned to the public for assistance.

Simon Partridge, a Met Office forecaster, said: "We are lucky the UK is a country where a lot of people are very interested in the weather - so they should be on our side to get as much data as possible.

"It's a similar scheme as to weather watchers on the BBC, but we get data rather than just photographs.

"The better data you put in, the better data you get out."

Wet weather on the last day of spring in London

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The Met Office's computer model divides the British Isles into 500,000 grid points but its 500 weather stations only gather a finite amount of data.

Instead forecasters are asking people to invest in small meteorological stations, which can be bought from electronic shops for about £60.

These can sense temperature, humidity, rainfall and pressure and upload results to a computer or directly to the Met Office's Weather Observation Website (Wow).

Mr Partridge said: "It is not 100 per cent reliable but it provides a good snapshot of what is going on around the country.

"Anything that looks too extreme is rejected."

Wow has received more than 850 million observations from 200 countries since its launch in 2011, the Met Office said.

It will promote the scheme this week at the Royal Society's Summer Science Exhibition.

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