Personal Weather Station - Siting Proper siting of a personal weather station can be very challenging, especially in an urban or suburban setting. We encourage you to review the Guide prior to setting up your station and during its operation.

CWOP data are sent in real-time from your Personal Weather Station (PWS) via the Internet or through a Ham Radio wireless RF broadcast to a site with an Internet connection (Digipeater) Data are forwarded to the CWOP servers, using the round-robin domain " cwop.aprs.net " port 14580 . Generally speaking, avoid obstructions and anything that may cause a biased reading, such as dark surfaces, or materials that cool slowly, such as concrete. We have prepared a manual (2.2 Mbyte pdf) for Personal Weather Station hobbyists called CWOP Weather Station Siting, Performance, and Data Quality Guide.

The number of North American CWOP stations sending data over the past several days is normally more than 7000 stations sending 50,000 to 75,000 observations every hour. CWOP is a volunteer-based network that allows owners of personal weather stations to share their station’s live data with the National Weather Service, emergency managers, wild land fire fighters, and Universities worldwide. You can if you send your data to the Citizen Weather Observing Program (CWOP)!

It’s likely that you won’t be able to meet all the suggestions here, but try to get as close as possible and remember to keep the sensors inside the wireless range of the console.
However, we strongly encourage weather observers to make the most of siting and Weather Station Siting Instructions. The number of world-wide citizen weather stations sending data to CWOP is shown increasing over the past decade.

For siting your weather station, we strongly recommend you follow the guidelines from the National Weather Service's Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP). CWOP understands perfect siting and equipment performance is not possible in all cases. To give you some idea of how valuable this data can be, check out this news link from CWOP which details some of the ways CWOP data is being used in extreme weather situations or in other unique ways. Once you acquire a CWOP identification (ID), set up your weather software/station to send your data! weather station reports and against the climatic record for your area. For more detailed instructions on signing up and configuring your weather station for CWOP, our colleagues at the El Paso National Weather Office have put together a great webpage that can help with everything from choosing a weather station, proper siting of the instruments, and signing up with CWOP.