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The WEATHER MARKET by Wesley Rosenblum [email protected] Brandon Rosenblum [email protected] Faculty Advisor Zachary Ives April 11, 2005Abstract Although there have been many advances over the past few decades in the field of meteorology, there still seems to be trouble consistently and accurately forecasting the everyday weather conditions across the country. Inaccurate forecasts can have a negative effect on our daily quality of life and even have a large financial impact. There have been estimates that if weather forecasts were just one degree more accurate, $1 billion in electricity could be saved each year. The trend to solving this problem has so far been to invest in larger and more powerful computers and supercomputers. Our idea is to harness the forecasting power of a community of individuals connected through the Internet. Rather than rely on the expertise of a single massive machine to make a forecast, our system relies on the expertise of thousands of people across the country. The way this is accomplished is through a web based system that allows anyone, anywhere who is registered with the site to make forecasts for various locations across the United States. A forecast consists of minimum and maximum temperature, precipitation amounts, wind speed, etc. As time progresses, the forecasts made by the site's users are compared to data acquired from the National Weather Service. The more accurate the forecast, the more "points" a user is awarded. A weighted average of all the forecasts for a particular location is presented as the overall forecast to outsiders. The more points a user has accumulated, the more their forecasts are weighted in the overall forecast. The Weather Market is a web site where the thousands and thousands of amateur meteorologists across the country can be part of a forecasting community that provides the most accurate forecasts possible to the public. The web site continuously gathers data about weather conditions across the country and compares them to the forecasts made by the site’s registered users. As more and more people use the site and make more and more forecasts, the forecasts presented to the public will increase in accuracy. The Weather Market is scalable such that a large number of users, on the order of thousands, are able to use the system at the same time. Related Work While many websites offer weather forecasts, no website exists that generates forecasts in a manner such as The Weather Market. Websites such as Weather.com and AccuWeather have meteorologists and computers that make forecasts that are posted online, with no user input. These websites serve mainly as the status quo for weather forecasting that The Weather Market will seek to transform. A website that does provide user input is Storm2k.org. This site has a forum where amateur meteorologists can participate in weekly contests where they can make predictions for high and low temperatures for a given set of cities. At the end of the week, each user’s predictions are compared to the actual temperatures and are ranked by accuracy. Similarly, the National Collegiate Weather Forecasting Contest offers participants the opportunity to predict temperatures and precipitation for the following day over an extended period of time. At the end of the contest, the individuals or groups with the highest accuracy are rewarded.There are several ways in which The Weather Market improves upon the basic idea that these weather forecasting contests provide. These contests do nothing with the individual forecasts except reward those participants with the highest accuracy. Our website uses those predictions to generate a forecast that other visitors to the site can use to plan their day. The forecasting contests only benefit those that participate, without making any use out of the gathered data. Once the contest is over, the previous forecasts are giving no consideration for future contests. Additionally, the weather forecasting contests do not offer a simple way to make predictions. For the National Collegiate contest, participants must pay to enter and are penalized for missing forecasts. Also, the forecasts must be sent by email instead of simply having the user fill out a form. The Weather Market is not a contest, but rather a community where amateur meteorologists can easily register their forecast. That is not to say that there is no reward for making accurate forecasts. The Weather Market keeps track of the past performance of its users, and that performance is visible to anyone on the site. A list of the top ten users is displayed on the main page and each user’s total points are displayed next to their username. The reward for making accurate forecasts will be the satisfaction of knowing you are one of the most accurate forecasters on The Weather Market. This type of reward will build and strengthen the community with the result being more accurate forecasts than any contest could provide. Technical Approach The Weather Market is a web based community that acquires, stores, and processes large amounts of data on a continual basis while dynamically presenting that data to users through a user friendly interface. A system of this nature requires a technology to develop server side web applications that can produce dynamic content, a backend database, and a method to retrieve data from the National Weather Service. The server side technology to generate dynamic web content is Microsoft’s ASP.NET 2.0. ASP.NET is installed and configured on Microsoft’s Internet Information Services web server. The backend database is Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Data is acquired from the National Weather Service by using the over 1,800 XML RSS feeds containing current weather conditions that the agency provides. The XML feeds are processed by an external application written in C#. This application is responsible for downloading the feeds, parsing the XML contents, and inserting the data into the database. The ASP.NET web application is split into three distinct layers: a data access layer, a business logic layer, and a presentation layer. ASP.NET Web Application Data Access Layer The data access layer, written in C#, is the primary interface to the database. All database logic remains on the database in the form of stored procedures. The data access layer simply provides a way to call the stored procedures with the appropriate parameters, and get back data in a


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Penn CIS 400 - The WEATHER MARKET

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