Have you ever seen the #dlws hashtag on Twitter? It's usually associated with an offhand comment or complaint about the weather. You may have used it to make your own observations too. But do you know what it all means on a larger scale?
By the time the subway reached Davisville, the ice pellets had turned to snow. #dlws— teva harrison (@robotpilot) April 11, 2013
DLWS, or the David Leonard Weather Service, is turning your complaints about the snow or rain into a real-time crowd-sourced weather map. While the project is more for fun than it is a scientific or functional study, it has proven that the potential for hyper-local citizen reporting of weather and weather patterns is entirely possible. This is increasingly important as cities and emergency responders are working on developing online mapping tools that pull data from social media to create a crowdsourced map of local situations in an emergency. This type of situational awareness can be used to respond to emerging issues and give communities access to hyper-local information in real-time.
The most important part of #dlws is not that the weather is being reported, but how it is being reported; as it happens. Don't be afraid to chime in with your own reports for #dlws; the more "correspondents" the better!
