(Hyper) Local on (More Than) the 8s

On time and temperature hotlines, economic growth, and the beauty of ultra-granular public weather data

When the Weather Channel debuted on May 2, 1982, it was a novel innovation in telecommunications. Up until that point, anyone without an oversized thermometer mounted outside their window had to either wait for a periodic weather check from a radio station or place a call to the local time and temperature line.

■ Then the Weather Channel, with all the convenience of a click of the cable converter box, the viewer could be assured of getting current conditions every ten minutes. That local temperature report, in most cases, was almost certainly just a rehashing of the hourly weather roundup from the local office of the National Weather Service and thus could be as much as 59 minutes old and no more precise than whatever conditions prevailed at the nearest airport. But what was eventually branded "Local on the 8s" still felt a lot more predictable than what had come before.

■ It hasn't been all that long in historical terms, but the difference between the turn of this century and today in terms of the density and freshness of weather observations is at least as dramatic as the move from the phonograph to streaming music services. Dozens of personal weather stations are available for $200 or less, many capable not only of measuring temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed, and rainfall, but also of reporting those results automatically over the Internet to data aggregators like Weather Underground.

■ West Des Moines, Iowa (population about 70,000) is blanketed with dozens of such stations, a situation not at all unusual for an affluent suburb. Compared with "Local on the 8s", the resulting granularity of data is astonishing -- temperatures reported to the tenth of a degree, current to the very minute, and precise to within half a mile of just about anyone in an urbanized area.

■ Is that level of precision necessary? Absolutely not. Is there anything meterologically advantageous to having sensors spaced no more than a half-mile apart? Apart from reporting on rare severe weather events, probably not. And yet it's a massive triumph, both technologically and economically.

■ The fact that a mid-sized metropolitan area can easily contain hundreds of personal weather stations -- virtually all installed voluntarily and at private expense -- is a symptom of a real economic triumph. A pure luxury good ends up becoming widely affordable, and in furnishing their data to aggregators, the buyers create a useful public good that any of their neighbors can access for free.