CWOP — Citizen Weather Observer Program Explained

CWOP — Citizen Weather Observer Program ExplainedWhat CWOP stations are, who runs them, how their hyper-local data complements official ASOS/AWOS observations, and accuracy caveats.CWOP is the Citizen Weather Observer Program — a network of personal weather stations operated by hobbyists, schools, businesses, and citizen scientists. Stations report through APRS to NOAA's data ingest, where the observations feed into surface analysis and verification.Strengths

Density: Many more stations than ASOS/AWOS — useful for spotting micro-scale features.

Real-time: Reports every few minutes vs. hourly METAR.

Hyper-local: A station two blocks from you reports your neighborhood's conditions.

Cautions

Quality varies: Siting and calibration are owner-dependent. A station next to an A/C exhaust will read warmer.

Less reliable than ASOS: Use METAR (Surface obs panel) as your gold standard; CWOP fills in the gaps.

Identifying stationsThe callsign you see (e.g. EW6362, KG5WBN) is the station's APRS identifier — ham radio operators reuse their callsigns; civilian stations are issued a code. Click any station to see its detail page on aprs.fi (the standard CWOP/APRS portal).Part of the BloomWX learn library — beginner-friendly explainers covering every surface of the BloomWX weather dashboard. Open BloomWX to see live data for any U.S. county.