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Concept
Surface weather observation
Summary
Surface weather observations are the fundamental data used for safety as well as climatological reasons to forecast weather and issue warnings worldwide. They can be taken manually, by a weather observer, by computer through the use of automated weather stations, or in a hybrid scheme using weather observers to augment the otherwise automated weather station. The ICAO defines the International Standard Atmosphere (ISA), which is the model of the standard variation of pressure, temperature, density, and viscosity with altitude in the Earth's atmosphere, and is used to reduce a station pressure to sea level pressure. Airport observations can be transmitted worldwide through the use of the METAR observing code. Personal weather stations taking automated observations can transmit their data to the United States mesonet through the Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP), the UK Met Office through their Weather Observations Website (WOW), or internationally through the Weather Underground Internet site. A thirty-year average of a location's weather observations is traditionally used to determine the station's climate. In the US a network of Cooperative Observers make a daily record of summary weather and sometimes water level information.
Reverend John Campanius Holm is credited with taking the first systematic weather observations in Colonial America. He was a chaplain in the Swedes Fort colony near the mouth of the Delaware River. Holm recorded daily observations without instruments during 1644 and 1645. While numerous other accounts of weather events on the East Coast were documented during the 17th Century. President George Washington kept a detailed weather diary during the late 1700s at Mount Vernon, Virginia. The number of routine weather observers increased significantly during the 1800s. In 1807, Dr. B. S. Barton of the University of Pennsylvania requested members throughout the Union of the Linnaean Society of Philadelphia to maintain instrumented weather observing sites to establish a climatological history.
Official source
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