WeatherWatch.co.nz has connected to New Zealand’s largest network of private and public weather stations and we’re proud to display all of this amazing data in one place, thanks to the efforts of many of you across the country.

As with anything as large as this you’ll always find some issues. We estimate about 90% of the weather stations are accurate or reliable, but certainly 10% are in need of fixing, fine-tuning, replacing or perhaps being entirely removed from the network.

If you see an incorrect reading the first thing you should do is REPORT it – every weather station we have here on our website has a link to do this. The more that we all work together to report incorrect data the more powerful this data network will be. We’ve already seen improvements in the quality of this data since we launched it publicly on our website several weeks ago.

It’s easy to report incorrect readings – you simply click on the weather station you have an issue with, click “Report bad data” and then select what is wrong, then hit send. That’s it!

WHAT ABOUT PUBLIC DATA FROM GOVERNMENT AGENCIES NIWA AND METSERVICE?

We also have public data – but we can’t control this – not yet anyway.

MetService – a Government owned forecaster – has public weather data that we all collectively own but MetService delays releasing this by 1 to 3 hours to keep their monopoly.  NIWA – another Government owned weather forecaster – delays your publicly owned weather observations for a full 24 hours for “quality control reasons”. This simply means “for their commecial gain” as there is really no use for ‘current data’ if it’s being delayed by 24 hours, not to mention no western Governments do this!  Because MetService and NIWA have these unfair rules that are designed to keep their power structure in place we’re very pleased the New Zealand Government and MBIE are officially and formally investigating this – and we hope this data will also be freed up, so New Zealand can finally join the international community. Currently we have Wellington standards, not international standards.

Until Minster Paul Goldsmith makes a decision on this open data review the New Zealand public will continue to see a mixture of live and delayed weather data from various sources unlike any other western nation on earth. We may ask the public to show your support for open weather data directly to Minister Paul Goldsmith if his office tries to delay this review. Delays so far have been due to MBIE so we hope the Minister recognises this and speeds up things at his end if possible. So far Minister Paul Goldmsith’s office has shown support to our cause so we’re very cautiously optimistic they will make the right decision…and soon.

APP USERS
With WeatherWatch being a small company with a free app and zero tax funding (unlike NIWA & MetService) it’s a bit harder for us to find the resources (money) to improve things faster, but we’re working with some new organisations this year who very much want to help improve what we have and grow it. We hope in our next App update later this year we’ll add features so you can report incorrect data, OR, choose a different weather station as your local. We hope by then the NZ Government will allow us to include live weather obs that we all collectively tax fund and own, via MetService and NIWA (the two NZ Government owned and funded weather forecasters).

If you have the time (and energy) you can always visit our Observations page and find the station and report it that way – or – simply email us and log it with WeatherWatch. We may not reply to every email, but will receive it. 

In the the meantime – thank you so much to all of you who have connected your weather stations to New Zealand’s only free open data network of current weather observations.  We’re very proud to be able to promote it and help improve it. A big thank you to Wunderground too, for working with WeatherWatch.co.nz and helping lift New Zealand’s standards while we wait for the Government to do the right thing with the weather observations we all collectively tax fund each year.

– WeatherWatch.co.nz